Informational Interview

My dream job

• Instructional design studio for educational organizations in China

Who did I meet

• Liu Shuo:
• Position: Executive of Undergraduate Department
• Company: New Oriental Education and Technology Group

Who is he

• He is my former boss.

His educational / career experience

• Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry from Tsinghua University, Beijing
• TOEFL Vocabulary teacher, Graduate Department
• GMAT Critical Reasoning Teacher, Graduate Department
• Manager on GMAT program, Graduate Department
• Executive of Undergraduate Department

Overview of his role and skills

• As a manager/executive for the firm, Mr. Liu has almost 100 teachers working for his department and hiring and training new teachers is a daily routine for him. He has a lot of experience in this area, and understands the difficulty of introducing standard, system and order to teaching in an organization

What advice do they have for someone who wants to move into the field, get closer to your dream job

• Whenever there’s a better design on market, the biggest problem implementing it is not to persuade the students to use it, but instead is to persuade the teachers (especially experienced teachers) to adopt a new instructional design in class. There’s just so much reluctance.
• In that case, if one ever wants to go into the business of instructional design for educational organizations, he should bear in mind that the design should be well-scaffolded for the teachers, and that the schema changing plan for the teachers should be chunked to accommodate their busy and fragmented schedules. Furthermore, Onsite assistance is very important at the beginning of the transition, so make sure there’s an export on site.

New steps

• Talk to the teachers more.
• Be a good analyst of needs for both the students and the teachers
• familiarize with prototyping and testing procedures, and learn to respond to feedbacks quickly