This portfolio consists of 11 projects (of many) that I completed between August of 2021 and May of 2023 while completing the Master of Education program in Learning Design and Technologies from the University of South Carolina.

 

One of the benefits of this program is that the course content is delivered via elearning, so students are consistently exposed to examples of elearning structure, design, and implementation before ever opening a textbook. Over the course of this program, I have had the opportunity to develop several different types of projects and media, such as online courses, graphics, reports, presentations, and a podcast. I believe I have been able to grow in both my theoretical knowledge as well as my practical application in order to create effective and engaging elearning. I have learned to conduct the research and evaluations necessary to create elearning, including treatment reports, formative evaluation plans, and conceptual research projects. In addition, I learned about web design, HTML, and web accessibility by creating several websites to house and display the research I performed in class for a broader audience. This program, through class research as well as collaboration with my classmates, has provided me with a broad exposure to web tools and other technology that allows us to shape new generations of learners in different ways.

 

One of the things I struggled with the most in this program was getting into the habit of writing prescriptive documents such as treatment reports. Typically, I am someone who likes to dive headfirst into a project or software, experiment as I go, and rework as I progress, but planning documents such as these reports required a different approach. Now that I have completed several of these documents, I understand their utility for large and comprehensive projects, especially when multiple courses must be documented and developed. For smaller projects, I may still stick with an instructional model such as rapid prototyping; it seems more my speed, and I still enjoy being able to “dive in” as much as I can!

 

One of the most beneficial things I gained from this program was the ability to look at instructional design from many different lenses. The variety in the field and in the tools available for designers is immense, and I had my eyes opened to more approaches to this subject than I would have initially expected. I come from a technology background (GIS), meaning I came into this program used to working with software and multimedia. However, I still encountered so many new techniques and tools relevant to student engagement, accessibility, and mentality that will prove vital in the future as I continue work in this field.

 

In both professional and academic contexts, I went through quite a journey over the course of this program, literally and figuratively. I definitely pushed my experience of distance learning to its full extent. My job calls for a lot of travel, so through trial and error I navigated maintaining my studies while driving and flying around the state and country. I was able to attend conferences in California and Maryland with other individuals who work in the intersection of water and education. From them, I learned firsthand about apprenticeship course design from the National Rural Water Association, my company's parent organization. In addition, being able to align my master's coursework to my company's educational needs ensured that I was able to see projects through the end of their assigned course and developed them beyond their original scope for a real-world purpose. The flexibility of this program in both its delivery and relation to my career was extremely beneficial for me over my two years here.