As an instructional designer, I take immense joy and pride in being able to combine my professional background as an educator with a love for design that I’ve nurtured throughout my life.
It’s impossible to separate my identity and experience as a teacher from any project that I take on, whether it’s designing curriculum or building an eLearning course. I believe one of the greatest strengths behind my instructional design work is a solid foundation in how to teach. My time as an educator was shaped by empathy for my students and a desire to reach them; I bring the same approach to my work in instructional design. I strive to create learning experiences that never lose sight of the learner’s needs. One of my favorite parts of designing instruction is scaffolding the concept into parts that will be easier to learn and retain, something that I did every day as a teacher. I take the learner’s prior knowledge and experience level into consideration as I work to solve the puzzle of how best to deliver the content. In what order should concepts be presented? Which parts are the most essential, and how can I assess the learner’s progress throughout? How can I accommodate different learners and learning styles? This dedication to crafting an intuitive, structurally sound learning experience is evident in my design work.
As I’ve acquired new knowledge and skills in the field of instructional design, I feel that many of my interests and passions have been reaffirmed. This is especially true of graphic design, which I’ve pursued as both personally and professionally since my first download of Photoshop at the age of sixteen. My style has evolved to favor clean, modern, and stimulating visuals that are tailored to the project’s concept and content. When selecting color palettes, typography, and assets for a project, I prioritize a cohesive look and feel. Producing high quality multimedia elements is a core component of my professional identity.
One aspect of instructional design work that I’ve come to truly enjoy is the development phase. I didn’t expect to find the process of building the experience to be anywhere near as compelling to me as the process of designing the visuals, but it turns out that I love to devise and build interactions for learners. Evaluating the content I want to teach and pairing it with the right type of interaction is a puzzle that I thoroughly enjoy solving. I am dedicated to find unique, creative, and innovative methods of presenting material to the learner. Sometimes this means finding an example of what I want to do and then reverse-engineering to find my own way of programming the interaction. Sometimes it means taking a familiar way and giving it a new twist. In my projects, my goal is to keep the learner engaged so as to maximize the amount of learning that is happening. A lot of that magic happens in the development phase, for me.
Instructional designers must be planners, thinkers, teachers, designers, and developers, among many other roles. These are all roles that I find to be very fulfilling. My professional identity will continue to evolve, but one thing that won’t change is my commitment to going the extra mile at every step of the process. My goal is to create designs that always reflect that effort and care in a way that benefits the learner.