MY PROGRAM

I honestly was not looking forward to taking a course entitled “Education as an Advanced Field of Study,” as I don’t have much interest in educational research. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the skills and documents that I developed and created. I will be able to use the documents at work and I know that I will continue to build upon my new skills.

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I had never used APA 7 for citing sources and being able to do so has already been very useful for the other course that I took at the same time, How People Learn. Learning how to choose trustworthy sources and looking for peer reviewed articles was an exercise that fit in well with the case study on spotting misinformation that I completed in How People Learn.

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The Education Narrative was a helpful exercise in reflection and highlighted the reasons I am interested in learning design in the first place, and how I can continue to build upon this interest. However, creating the infographic on accessibility and this ePortfolio were by far the projects that I enjoyed working on the most, and the ones that I think will benefit me the most in the long run.

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Before working on the accessibility infographic, I didn’t know much about accessibility of instructional materials, except that it was something that I should probably be concerned about. Through the process of finding sources for the infographic and distilling their content into 7 tips that faculty members can use, I learned how accessibility of resources is an issue for everyone. Well designed and accessible resources are easier for everyone to use. It can be time consuming to go back and update materials so that they are accessible, but building in accessibility from the beginning just requires a little bit of thought and planning. I’m excited to make a few updates to the infographic and to share it in onboarding resources with the faculty members that I manage. I will also be making a conscious effort to make all future faculty and learner support documents that I create accessible, and I have a lot of work to do with making current internal playbooks and resources accessible.

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I will continue to build upon what I’ve learned about accessibility and have been challenging myself to make all of the materials I create throughout this program accessible. For example, before this course I never included audio transcripts with learning materials, but from now on I will. Creating this ePortfolio I chose a black background and white text because I wanted it to be high contrast and easy to see, and I was surprised when working through Wix’s Accessibility Wizard that many of my pages did not meet the contrast guidelines for accessibility. Happily, that was easy to tweak and now I know what is required going forward.

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Creating this ePortfolio has been time consuming, but I do enjoy and know that I benefit from the process of gathering my materials and thoughts into one place. I’m curious to see how my work progresses through this master’s program and how I can turn this learning ePortfolio into a career ePortfolio.