Artefact #5 - Business Development Project

Artefact #5 - Business Development Project

This project involved the development of a business idea into a successful venture, which involved thorough market research, competitor’s analysis, identification of the business’ products/services, and most importantly numbers. The idea was to develop an education business that was unique and could be successful based on research and analysis. I worked on this project with a fellow student from Greece in the MDDE605 course. Essentially, the entire course was based around this project where we needed to come up with a business idea related to education, more specifically distance education. The three key pieces we developed were:

• Produce a Business Proposal for a DE Organization
• Produce a Distance Education Strategic Plan
• Create a Distance Education Business Plan and Financial Plan

Reflection

This project in my opinion was the turning point for me where I was able to connect the dots between how a business of distance education, and instructional design services, co- operate. I was able to develop a more comprehensive view into world of education and how to measure different areas of course development into hours and dollars. Essentially, how education connects to the business world.

My partner and I came up with a business idea of a training and development consultancy business, where we offered course development for distance, hybrid and face to face courses. Additionally, we offered contract consultancy services for instructional design, LMS support, webinar delivery training, etc. The experience of generating the idea of the business was very engaging and collaborative for both of us. The final business was a combination of our ideas as we saw the potential ideas, which we were very passionate she was coming from a high school level teaching background, while I was coming from higher education instructional design background, so in a lot of ways, our skills complimented each other (5.1, 5.5, 6.1, 6.2, 6.4).

The strangest part of the entire process was we both never met or spoke on the phone, we always chatted using Google Chat (5.7, 5.10). We had to be considerate of each other’s time zone and scheduled times that met both our schedules, so for me it would be during lunch time at work, while for her it was after work in the evening. This practice of communicating via Google Chat took place once a week, for a period of over 2 months. Once we both had our business identified, we began to start writing and divided it up into parts. The final identification of the products/services our business offered took about a month, and by the second month, we were able to start writing the business plan (5.10).

By completing this project, I was able to identify the reasoning and understand the importance of quantifying what I do for a living (5.8). For example, I learned how to estimate costs or hours for a given task or project; how revenues are brought in and how much it costs to produce a course; what kind of services an Instructional Designer can provide to clients with her/his knowledge in the field of design and development; and how non-profit organizations operate in the field of distance education (5.10).

In essence, I can say that this project allowed me to apply a lot of my skills learned from the previous courses. In addition, I took away the ability to successfully develop a business which involved the following key areas of expertise:

• distance education course design, development, and assessments/evaluations;
• webinars;
• advisory and consulting services;
• assessment creation and deployment;
• evaluation creation and deployment (6.1, 6.2, 6.4)

Throughout the M. Ed. Program, we learned about all of the above areas of expertise, however, this was the most experience I was able to gain without being able to implement these skills in an actual work environment.