Personal Statement
One of my goals, as I entered the IDD&E program, was to leverage as much of my prior practical and cognitive experiences toward developing an identity as an instructional designer. At each learning milestone, I phrased each experience, project, or paper as an extension of my academic, philosophical and professional experiences in the field of Communication and media arts.
As I emerge from the IDD&E Master’s program, I task myself with articulating the identity I had set forth to form – not just for the portfolio requirement herewith, but also for prospective employers and for peers. I believe the instructional design competencies I have developed with greatest strength are in the areas of creatively visualizing instructional information and writing instructional content with clarity. While I have had many years of prior experience in both of these skills, the IDD&E program has reformed the foundation of my visual and writing voice and approach. This foundation is essential for the effective design and development of distributed learning systems – my chosen area of degree concentration.
The Project Management component of my IDD&E experience has had a positive influence on my team leadership skills, helping to formalize and structure work to accommodate larger projects with more team members. In combination with Front-end Analysis skills and resources, I believe I have advanced my ability to operate in an education environment, such as in communicating in the professional language of learning and training, and assessing the context of client goals. I expect to continue to develop my project management and front-end analysis skills in my experiences as a professional in the Instructional Design field.
Although my career plans do not include dedicated involvement with evaluation, I expect that the work that I produce will be subject to evaluation, and that I will be called upon to evaluate the usefulness of certain tools or platforms as part of a larger instructional program. From this perspective, I am able to articulate the criteria upon which a design or development decision might be based in future evaluation judgment.
Many hours spent here.
On several occasions, I have described myself as occupying a space somewhere in the “sweet spot” between purely creative media disciplines and the wisdom of Instructional Design. This perspective, I believe, helps me to generate media that is not merely engaging to watch, but supportive in an instructional context.
As it turns out, I write this essay just days after having accepted a fulltime staff position with a state college system as a Rich Media Specialist working within their instructional design department. Do I feel 100% prepared for all of its challenges? Certainly not, though I will rely on my academic foundation and personal alliances I have formed here in the IDD&E program to support myself.
I regret that I will not be able to continue my education to pursue a doctoral degree, as I have many questions about Distance Learning that can only be answered through research. As a Web designer and multimedia developer, I find the semantics of learner behavior in formal online instruction to be a rich area for further inquiry. I expect, as a practitioner, that I will be given opportunities to observe and respond to the needs of learners in numerous Distance Learning situations. Thus, I expect that my professional development will never plateau, and that tracking my competencies will be a continuous, fully integrated component of my workstyle.
