Graduate students, Chapin Brinegar and Jean Snider, of the University of North Carolina Wilmington Watson School of Education's Master of Instructional Technology (MIT) program took first place in the PacifiCorp Design and Development competition for promising instructional design students in masters and doctoral programs. The final phase of the year-long competition was held in Jacksonville, Fla. last week during the Association for Educational Communication and Technology (AECT) international conference. Brinegar and Snider are the first students from the MIT program to enter the competition and received top recognition for their community-based training and educational solution for a case study involving a biotech start-up company.

The design and development competition, sponsored by PacifiCorp, one of the West's leading utilities, is designed to promote collaboration among students, faculty, and industry practitioners in the field of instructional design. Instructional design is the analysis of performance problems and learning needs to systematically design, develop, implement, manage and evaluate a learning solution. Students of instructional design come from varied backgrounds, including education, business and industry, and the military. One of the goals of the competition is to recognize innovative design and development approaches to adult learning and performance problems.

In the first phase of the competition, teams of two submitted a preliminary proposal for a solution to an organizational performance and/or training problem. A panel of judges selected six proposals to move to the second phase. Each team was assigned a mentor from education, business or industry to help them prepare a more detailed proposal for the final competition. In the final phase of the competition, three teams were selected to present their proposals at the AECT conference. The winning proposal was selected based on clarity, teamwork and professionalism.

The MIT program prepares professionals from a variety of backgrounds to meet the challenges of developing sound, results-driven educational and training solutions for not only educational settings, but also for business and the military. The program prepares students for real-world problems and working with real-world clients. Brinegar and Snider attribute their success in the competition to a solid foundation in instructional design theory and modeling as well as the practical experience gained through their coursework in the MIT program.

For more information on the PacifiCorp Design and Development competition visit, http://www.aect.org/pacificorp/.

Media Contact:
Joy Davis, UNCW Marketing and Communications, 910.632.3903 or davisjc@uncw.edu