Prior to enrolling in this program, I had never taken a single education course. I had no background of knowledge in learning theories, and no conceptualization of the historical evolution of the field of education or the process of learning. I found the courses EDIT 6100E Introduction to Instructional Technologies and EDIT 6400E Teaching and Learning Technologies to be extremely helpful for getting up to speed on the topic of cognition. As an artifact for the theme Foundations, I have linked my Personal Application Paper from EDIT 6400E. I chose this artifact because it connects significant learning theories to my current work and demonstrates how to apply the content that I’ve been learning to my ‘real world’ experiences.
I selected the Instructional Design Project from EDIT 6170E as an artifact representative of the importance of a detailed Needs Analysis. This project was a team project, but was inspired by, and later used in, my work in student services at UNG. I recognized the many facets of classifying your learner population, and the necessity of providing a detailed description of your learners to all stakeholders involved in the project.
I would also like to highlight my team's Evaluation Plan from EDIT 7350E. This team project had a much larger scope than assessment, but I found making an Assessment Plan as part of a larger project to be a valuable learning experience. Each 'chunk' of the overall Assessment Plan had to be carefully considered, and the evaluation component comprised an important part of this overall effort.
In EDIT 7520E Online Teaching and Learning, I designed an online training module for new student ambassadors at the University of North Georgia. I selected the Final Design Document for the Online Student Ambassador Training because it details the comprehensive list of factors considered in the design of the modules, including the learning objectives, learning environment, target population, timeline for implementation, instructional strategies, assessment and evaluation plans.
As an example of some of my development work, I chose to include this example of using sliders in Storyline. As I reflect on this assignment, there are several things I would like to do differently. First, I don't think a slider is the best use of navigation for this content. Second, I wish that I had similar pictures of all of the Ugas standing in a similar position. If that were the case, the slider could be used to 'morph' from one Uga to the next, which would have made for a more interesting interaction, and would have been a better use for this navigational tool. Although there are things I would do differently now, I see this artifact as a demonstration of a handy tool learned in this program.
As an artifact to demonstrate implementation, I'd like to highight the first project that I created in this program, a SCORM published orientation module. I selected this assignment because I found it to be one of the most challenging assignments in the program. Prior to this project, I had never SCORM (or web) published anything, and found the process quite daunting as a new student.
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One of my favorite courses in the program was EDIT 7350E. In this course, my team was given an app that a UGA faculty member had created to evaluate and provide feedback to the developer on. This became a rich learning experience because we found that while we could identify issues, we didn't always know how to best resolved them. The team utilized a Hueristic Protocol to evaluate the app and produced an Evaluation Report for the faculty member and stakeholders. This was one of the largest assignments that I completed in the program, and I still find myself looking back to it as a resource when evaluating my current work.