Hi, I’m Kylie. I am a graduate student at UVIC working on my M.Ed. in Educational Technology. I have a hybrid career, working part-time as an educator and as a project manager. As an educator, I teach online at a school called 64GO in the Southern Gulf Islands. I teach many different courses from grades four to adult although my background as a teacher is in secondary English and Social Studies. As a project manager, I work for a municipality in the lower mainland and oversee the childcare portfolio. My hybrid career allows me to be creative, solve many challenges, and live a comfortable life on Pender Island. I often find links between both roles and enjoy being an advocate for change and feeling like I have a sense of purpose. I like to evaluate problems, learn how to work in complex systems and make positive and lasting changes. I am lucky to live in the Southern Gulf Islands and find peace in this rural place. I am involved in my community, and always have one volunteer role on the go at any time and am currently a director on the childcare board on Pender Island.
Why am I interested in learning design? I am interested in learning design for my entire life picture, and not only in my role as an educator. Learning design is broadly defined. I am considering learning design defined as the design of a learning experience to support a learning goal. I know that I can be more intentional in my practice as an educator and am curious about the different theories of learning design, particularly when teaching online. I am new to teaching at the online school, and some of my students only interact with me via email, phone, Brightspace, or Zoom, so my thought process is very different for them than in a traditional classroom. I am likewise curious how learning design might help guide my practice as a project manager. I spend most of my time understanding a problem, and then teaching others how to break this down into smaller pieces, or how to connect parts of a system in a new way. I wonder if there are ways that I can more intentionally teach others how to solve these problems alongside me.
What experience do I have with learning design, and how might I explain my process of designing learning experiences? As an educator, I have experience with learning design through my work. When designing learning experiences, I think ahead about the subject matter, my approach, the learners, and the physical environment. There are many layers to each of these considerations such as my approach, which might include things like my tone of voice, body language, mood and thoughts, and my level of attention. Where I work at the online school, my role as an educator is slightly different than in a traditional classroom. Some ways that it is different are that I often work individually with students, I have a different composition of students each week, and I never know who will be in the classroom in person. As mentioned, I also have some students who I will never meet in person and who only interact asynchronously, and my process for designing learning experiences is therefore different.
This week, I am starting to dive into the readings that will get me started on the path to explore learning theories.
Photo by Kylie Van Eaton.