Trends and issues in eLearning are the historical and predictive patterns for the field. In order for me to design well, I must know the emerging trends and issues as well as the history of the tools, methods, and theory. In a few instances, predicting the future is best done by examining the past. This industry moves as fast as the technology industry. My challenge is to keep the historical knowledge and emerging trends in mind when designing. I believe this is a key ingredient in designing learning for the learners.
Project Proposal – New Employee Orientation
I use project proposals to justify instruction or alternatives to instruction based on analysis. In this document, I provided a justification for the need of a new employee orientation at a fictional company. I used this for analyzing the environments, audiences, and industries for the orientation. Every project needs a good start on a project proposal to ensure all team members in many locations have the same understanding of a project goal and preferred outcomes.
Download Proposal Here: New Employee Orientation Proposal
Change Report – Project Information Sheet for Small Business Research
I proposed a change for project information storage and retrieval to help research assistants obtain information more easily within a research business. I provide this work example only. Our analysis and implementation of a project management solution revealed larger frustrations and two job aids were created. This report outlines this change within the small business and what the solutions were to project management problems. The company still uses evolved versions of these solutions.
Download Report Here: Change Proposal
Video Animation – The eLearning Family Tree (Group Project)
My team and I created “The eLearning Family Tree” with an animated presentation to creatively show the emergence of the instructional design field from two parent fields: Learning Technology and Distance Learning. This brief video of the eLearning origins contains personified learning industry “characters” who reflect on learning history, present trends, and the future of eLearning.
Team Members: Elisabeth Gallagher, Christopher Smith, and Susannah Simmons.
E-Learning Trends and Issues – Mobile Gamification (Group Project)
In this this mobile gamification project, my team and I investigated two learning trends separately – mobile learning & gamification – and discussed the potential of using the two trends together in a workplace setting. We included considerations of mobile gamification regarding the following topics:
- pros & cons of each trend separately
- adoption of each trend separately
- mLevel’s success story as a top mobile gamification company
- mobile gamification’s potential impact
Team Members: Elisabeth Gallagher and Susannah Simmons.
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Equity Reflection – Tutoring Tommy
As part of my experience studying trends in e-learning education, I was challenged to consider inequity in education. In this website, I provided a podcast recording of my reflection in the topic of inequity while tutoring a pre-teen named Tommy. I was in my last few years of college and found this to be a turning point in my understanding of these disparities in educational attainment. I touch on my increased awareness and implications as an instructional professional.
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Internship
I completed an internship in Learning Technology at the College of Nursing at Anschutz Medical Campus for the University of Colorado.
Further, my main project was to design and develop a New Faculty Role Orientation in the form of a Canvas course delivered in conjunction with the new faculty orientation currently completed by Human Resources and Faculty Development. The course title is “Your First Year as Teaching Faculty at the College of Nursing.” The module will achieve three main goals:
The modules achieve three main goals:
- Provide a school overview, including mission, vision, and philosophy of the College of Nursing.
- Teach skill-based information on faculty roles in curriculum and course development.
- Welcome the new faculty members to the team.
My supervisor evaluated my success by measuring my accurate completion of assigned tasks and reviewed my application of instructional design skills and theory.
This internship was be completed January-April 2017.
Download a report here: Internship Reflection and Report
Research in Learning Technology
Effective background research skills are required for me to be capable of giving a comprehensive idea of the target audiences of my learning experiences. In exploring my interest in healthcare education, I wrote about the fidelity and cognitive load of healthcare education simulations. My argument was the fidelity level may be directly correlated to the level of cognitive load. In other words, when a learner is a beginner and needs simple scenarios, then the fidelity could be low in order to offer a clean learning experience. And for learners who are more expert, then the fidelity could be higher by adding real-life variables to simulations to offer a low-risk practice situation for high-risk procedures or tasks within the healthcare field.
Download Paper Here: Scaffolding Simulation Based Learning Using Fidelity
