Designing Engaging Online Courses

My story

No matter how cliché it seems, my path to a career in education began in Kindergarten. I was four when I started school, and I adored my teacher who taught me how to play and laugh and sing and learn new things at the same time. My favorite "game" during playtime was classroom, and I was always the teacher.

In high school, I had an English teacher my sophomore year who made us combine poetry, prose, and other artwork into a book project. I became obsessed with the details and even hand-tied the pages together. I'd been writing poetry consistently since 8th grade, and I really found my love of writing poems in high school. My favorite poem of the book was "Missed Opportunities." To this day, it's one of my favorites I've written. This teacher went out of his way to keep me after class to let me know that my work had left an impression on him. This made me want to teach English.

I spent my junior college years debating two majors: Psychology and English. When I transferred to the university and took Shakespeare my first semester, I was sold on the English major. In my senior year, I had Writing for Teachers professor who loved to read and write so much that she seemed to authentically enjoy reading our writing and writing us feedback every other day for class. She was so excited to discuss with us everyday, and she made me want to become a great writing teacher, to instill the love of writing in students.

Writing, editing, rewriting, and editing again was a passion of mine in college. I loved thinking of essay writing as a science. There are requirements and aspects that create the perfect reaction. The longer the essay, the greater the challenge. I also wrote creatively and would always find my state of flow when writing, even those required essays. I would get completely consumed by the process for hours on end without thinking of food or drink. It would be mid-day, and I'd realize five hours had passed.

When I started my teaching career at my own high school, the school was going fully digital; every student was receiving a Chromebook and we were encouraged to teach most things using the online LMS. I taught sophomore English, which was a dream-come-true, but what I realized I was really passionate about was the design aspect of teaching. I'd spend hours after school let out designing the next day's lesson to a time-consuming amount of detail, and I always enjoyed this process. I often found myself walking to my car at dark wondering where the afternoon had gone. The state of flow I'd experienced writing stories and essays as a college student returned when I was designing new lessons as a teacher.

I followed that design passion to my current position: instructional designer. Now I spend the greater portion of my days in a long state of flow.