Best Online Instructional Technology Education Degrees for 2024

If you’ll be returning to a previous employer after graduation, you won’t have to concern yourself with finding a job after you leave the stage where you just walked across to accept your diploma.

If you don’t have a promise from an employer that you have a job waiting for you, you’ll have to update and send out resumes, write cover letters that express your interest and “fit” for an announced educator’s position, and attend and actively participate in an interview with the hiring manager if not an entire committee of supervisors or administrators.

While you’ve been through this process multiple times in the past, you may not be aware of new best practices and beliefs. This is where a Career Placement and Services office will help you. Counselors in this office are specially educated and trained to offer you guidance and advice as you embark on your job search.

From help in re-crafting your resume to developing new, updated cover letters and practicing in mock interviews, you will receive a large amount of invaluable help. Taking this time and trouble to learn what you need to know means that potential employers will appreciate your efforts—which may lead to a job offer.

Where you go to college does matter. First, you need to be accepted by an accredited university and program. Beyond that, your chosen university should have developed a good name and reputation that, when you begin job interviews, will lead to employers considering you seriously as a possible employee.

The question may come down to price or prestige. You may not be able to afford the most expensive, Ivy League universities and colleges. Prestige can cost a very pretty penny, even with financial aid. This means price becomes even more important in the equation. Aside from just price, consider the most recent rankings of universities you may be considering.

If you choose a university because of its instructional technology education program rather than prestige or ranking, your salary offer may end up being lower than it otherwise could be. The more elite programs may equate to a higher annual salary. And, over time, this effect continues. The median annual salary of those who chose elite universities will continue to be higher than for those who chose state universities. Students who graduated from high school in 1980, moved to elite universities, then graduated, had wages 20% higher than those from state universities.

One factor in the above: the study containing these numbers didn’t separate out students who graduated from college from those who dropped out. That factor may have negatively affected the average wage picture for graduates of state universities since more students successfully graduate from more exclusive universities.

Even more significant, women who attended a university that was a cut above a state university received wages that were 17.4% higher than students who attended state universities. For men, the difference was a gap of 8.1%. So, as you are considering which college to choose, take ranking or prestige into account if all other considerations are about equal.

Instructional technology provides better ways to provide training and education to those who might have a hard time attending traditional classes, those who are learning/training in a work environment, and more. However, it does more than provide a new way to provide training and education. It also provides entirely new ways to garner feedback about those trainings and educational programs so that we can ensure that training is achieving what we want it to achieve and we can make sure that students are being taught in a way that is most likely to create long-term learning. Teachers can gather or provide near-instant feedback, they can use digital tools to figure out where students are in a lesson and see who might be falling behind or need special attention, and they can provide extra learning opportunities for those who complete their lessons ahead of the pack.

In these programs, you will learn not only to use existing instructional technology programs and techniques, but also how to design your own. This includes every step of the design process, from analysis of student learning methods to the implementation of brand-new learning platforms and programs. You’ll learn how to design new elements of these programs in a way that engages students, perhaps even making learning fun as so many programs promise but fail to do. You’ll evaluate how these new programs are used in the field or in test scenarios. And you’ll use that evaluation to tweak and hone your program to create the best possible platform for learning that you can.

The answer to that is strongly based on your desires for a career and your overall interests. Maybe you like the idea of helping people learn, but you’re not strong on a face-to-face basis, or maybe you love technology, but you want to use it in a way where it is implemented to help people. Both of these personalities are likely to do well in instructional technology. You must be interested in and have a knack for technology, but you must also be willing to build your programs to serve a specific group and be certain that they will gain the most good out of the solution you create. It’s definitely true that much of our educational system and even our work training scenarios are moving more and more into the realm of technology, so it’s likely that there will be plenty of jobs available in this field for years.