When it comes to professional knowledge and skills, after completing a few performances geared towards my students, I became quite adept at using technology to enhance the learning outcomes I have for them. This is a group where most of the focus of my job is geared towards, so professional knowledge and skills is quite vast. Where I was able to grow and improve was putting together my Multimedia e-Learning Environment, which was created for professional peers. This allowed me to consider what others who do the same job would need to help improve their practice, and how we could use technology to connect, share, and learn together.
For my Multimedia eLearning Environment I wanted to create a professional development environment for practicing academic advisors. I have taken a number of courses through my professional development organization, NACADA, and found them to be very helpful in how I do my job. I decided to use key aspects of those courses to create an online community for advisors in the College of Health Sciences at UD. The learning environment involves a lot of discussion board activities and resource sharing, which I found to be an effective way for colleagues to share best practices with each other.
The course I used for my Instructional Design course is taught to traditional first-year students at the University of Delaware. These students are not only new to the college environment and its teaching methods, but also new to the technology and resources available. Therefore, I chose to use technology as a substitution and an augmentation, to ease students into an online teaching environment. This also allowed for community building in a traditional classroom setting, which is important for early student development.
My Curriculum Project is a series of screencast videos explaining to new students how to use important technology based around class registration at the University of Delaware. As one of the last projects in the Educational Technology program, this involves a high use of technology and is backed by several learning theories, such as cognitivism, learner-centered, and the multimedia principle. Unlike other project ideas, this one was executed in a real-world scenario and followed up with a survey of its effectiveness. I learned a lot from getting to implement a technology plan in a real-world environment and getting instant feedback from university students, which is an audience most of my performances wish to target.