Choosing a Graduate School is never an easy task; especially if you don’t have immediate access to people that have done it before. With that in mind, I set my own guidelines and search schedule. Here’s what I did:
Step 1: Define exactly what you would like to get out of graduate school and set Minimum Criteria.
Step 2: Search for all of the schools that meet your minimum criteria.
Step 3: Evaluate Programs based on your Criteria, Weed out schools that do not meet minimum criteria.
Step 4: Extensively research all remaining programs and narrow list to top five.
Step 5: Get comparable course syllabus from each school, Interview instructors and former students. Narrow down list as much as possible.
Step 6: Apply to all remaining schools, Take GRE if necessary.
Step 7: After getting Acceptance Letters, do some serious soul searching and make a final decision
Okay, this was the process I laid out in advance of my search. So here’s how it worked out for me.
Step 1: Define exactly what you would like to get out of graduate school and set Minimum Criteria.
My Criteria
(1) My top criteria was that the degree MUST be viewed as valuable by top industry managers
(2) Degree must be related to using Technology in Training
(3) School must be within commuting distance, OR have an excellent Online Program
(4) Program must give me the opportunity to be noticed
(5) Program must be challenging
(6) Program must be affordable
(7) Instructors should be published, and well known in the industry
(8) Instructors make time to coach and mentor students if they seek it out
(9) Support Staff should be friendly, timely and helpful
(10) I’m a HUGE College Football fan. It would be icing on the cake if I went to a school that had a football team I would enjoy following
Step 2: Search for all of the schools that meet your minimum criteria.
With my criteria in place, I came up with a list of about twenty schools. I’m not going to list them all here. See Step 3 for a portion of my list.
Step 3: Evaluate Programs based on your Criteria, Weed out schools that do not meet minimum criteria.
After applying my criteria, the remaining schools were:
University of Missouri – Columbia
Florida State University
University of Georgia
University of Illinois
Indiana University
Penn State
San Diego State University
Boise State University
Bloomsburg University
Colorado State University - Denver
University of Central Florida
University of Texas
University of Massachusetts – Boston
Step 4: Extensively research all remaining programs and narrow list to top five.
Now that I had a smaller list of schools, I began to research each program. I looked at each of their websites extensively. One of the things that stood out to me was each schools website design. I noticed that some schools have a single web page or two to describe their program, while other schools have entire websites. Also, Dreamweaver is typically a tool used to create eLearning, so it surprised me a little bit to see how plain some of these websites were. First impressions are very important!
Anyway, at this point I began to read the faculty webpage’s at each school to see what they had been up to. Some of them I had heard of before, like Allison Rossett at SDSU, and Karl Kapp at Bloomsburg University. I also knew that Florida State was the origin of Instructional Systems Design. Some other things stood out to me… Some schools emphasized the use of technology; others emphasized Learning Theory, which would be assisted by technology.
One other thing I noticed, some of the schools were willing to put up students work. San Diego State probably has the best website overall.
Here’s what else I noticed… Some of the programs had both Synchronous and Asynchronous training. Some had traditional course layouts, while others used COHORTS.
By the time I finished my list it looked like this:
San Diego State
Indiana University
Bloomsburg University
Florida State
University of Illinois
University of Missouri – Columbia
Boise State University
Okay, that’s more than five, but I was making progress.
Step 5: Get comparable course syllabus from each school, Interview instructors and former students. Narrow down list as much as possible.
For a comparison, I decided to look at each schools basic Adult Learning Theory course Syllabus. I also set up an appointment to speak with instructors at each school, to get an idea of how they would go about teaching a course, and what the average student could expect at their school. Then I made my next cut:
SDSU
IU
Bloomsburg
U of I
Boise State
I cut out Florida State specifically because of the cost of attendance. I really didn’t want to go too far into debt obtaining my Masters Degree.
The University of Missouri was hard to cut from my list. I would have gone to school there if they had some form of on-campus courses, but they didn’t. When I compared their online program to the others, it didn’t seem as involved.
Step 6: Apply to all remaining schools, Take GRE if necessary.
Next Step… GRE… My scores were high enough to enroll at all of the schools on my list, so I did.
Step 7: After getting Acceptance Letters, do some serious soul searching and make a final decision.
Much to my surprise, I was accepted by all of the schools on my list. I wasn’t expecting to be accepted at every school because of low class sizes. This made my final decision that much harder. For this, I got some help from my Corporate Mentor, Adam. Adam advised me that if I wasn’t set on studying the “How To” of educational technology, that perhaps it would be more strategically advantageous for me to study training on a more broad/strategic level. That left one school on my list… Boise State University. Here’s where the others Stood:
SDSU – Educational Technology (EDTECH) - (Focus is more on development than strategy)
IU – EDTECH – (Same)
Bloomsburg – EDTECH – (Same)
U of I – Human Resources Development (My long-term career goal is to get into Learning and Development, however, without HR experience I didn’t feel that this degree would be helpful to me)
Despite the advice from Adam, my decision was still hard, and here’s why. Boise State is completely Asynchronous, and I personally would have liked to take courses where I could verbally interact with other students and the instructors. Schools that met these criteria were U of I, IU, and SDSU. The courses are laid out in a traditional format, where I was more interested in belonging to a COHORT. The only school left on my list that used COHORTS was U of I (Colorado State has an impressive COHORT program, but they were not on my final list for other reasons).
Boise State offers a Masters Degree in Instructional and Performance Technology. To make a long story short, it focuses less on the actual development of eLearning, or of an LMS, and more on figuring out how to improve performance on an individual and organizational level using Scientific Methods. Boise State has a very close relationship with the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI), in which they have students publish their projects monthly in an article called Performance Express. Their students also do annual presentations at ISPI.
Here’s something else I liked about the program that you just can’t put a price on… People at Boise just seem to have a drive to excel. They are very determined to maintain and improve upon their programs status, which is very obvious after speaking with them. They are constantly evaluating what’s happening in the world of training, and re-working their program to ensure that graduates have the skills companies are looking for. That was the most appealing to me. In the end, I felt like that drive was a match for my personality type, and it made me feel really good about my choice.
Going forward, I begin Graduate School this week. I plan to use this blog as a way to take notes for my courses. That means I will probably post more than once per week, and the topics will be centered on what I am learning at the time in school. However, I still plan to discuss challenges related to do-it-yourself trainers.
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