Showcase
As I am not an educator in the traditional sense, my goal in attending Michigan State's Master's in Educational Technology program was to learn as much as I could about different educational approaches and implement them into my organizational learning and development program. I decided to pursue a certification in online teaching, a certification in serious gaming and my masters degree in educational technology.
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Below is a showcase that features artifacts that had a significant impact on the development of ARI employees' professional skills. The artifacts are grouped by graduate certifications and the hybrid program.
Online Teaching Certification
I decided to start with my online teaching certification because at the time I was doing a lot of remote training for my organization. I was based in Grapevine, Texas and responsible for providing consistent training for all North American contact centers. We were also transitioning to a new learning management software, I was able to use what I was learning to implement a "Back to the Basics" hybrid classroom experience from my Teaching Students Online and Electronic Assessment courses. In the video below I walk you through the online module.
One area for improvement in my organization was being able to personalize the learning experience. With 400 employees in the contact center it was difficult to determine what type of personal attention that each employee needed to be successful. Through my learning from my online teaching certification program I was able to implement online portfolios for each individual employee. These portfolios were used to determine their personality, learning preferences, what their professional potential was and how to motivate each employee at a personal level.
Working in a contact center it was very difficult to communicate to many employees in order to inform them about how their efforts learned in the classroom are directly impacting the goals. In the fleet management business we are tasked with keeping overall costs down for our clients by negotiating vehicle repairs and looking for savings. At the time, the railroad industry was hurting and challenged my department with increasing their savings by 5%. I learned about infographics and used them to constantly remind the employees of the goals ahead and created the example below to reinforce the message from the classroom setting.
Due to unforeseen personal circumstances, I had to take a semester off and came back to complete my Online Teaching Certification after completing my Serious Gaming Certification and it turned out to be great timing. We were looking for new ways of developing new quality measures within our department and with the assistance of my Learning Technology Through Design course, I was able to help change the way we run quality checks with a huge impact on our customer service measures. Below is a video I used to explain the QA process and a link to the report we later implemented into my organization.
Serious Gaming Certification
In my quest to learn new ways of teaching material I was able to learn how to make learning fun through design and gamification, which was a hot topic in the corporate learning and development field at the time. through my courses in the serious gaming program I was able to learn about my specific audience and develop a game to get them to understand why we were making changes in or organization in a fun way. I designed "Behind the Metrics" a fun board game where the employees tried to build their own company and learned the importance of key performance indicators (KPIs). Below is a video of a couple of employees playing the game and a link to the "Behind the Metrics" website.
I designed a video game that could be used to simulate real world applications that my students needed interaction to learn. One of the concerns that we had was that many of the employees came from the automotive field, but they did not fully understand what was involved in Hyrail Inspections, Heights and Loads, String-line and Track Tests. As my audience are very hands on learners based on their mechanical backgrounds I designed an online game that simulated what it would take to perform the tasks they are questioning as seen in the video below.
Master of Arts in Educational Technologies Year 2 Hybrid Cohort
Being in the corporate world it is difficult to take extended time off, but with a change in our paid time off policy and support from my management staff I was able to take part in the on campus year two cohort program. I learned a ton of information and made some great relationships with other educators in this program! After learning many different learning practices, leadership and psychologies of learning I wanted t research how to show my stakeholders the return on investment (ROI) of my training plans. I was able to change our training project planning methods to match those of the Kirkpatrick and ADDIE models in order to ensure we are able to report back on the successes of the training programs. Below is a link to my research paper on Training Evaluation Methods and the Return on Investment.
I was challenged with coming up with three minute video that provided three key ideas and three practical implications of these ideas for educators. I decided to create the video below on creative thinking in the context of new literates and made a silent film. The film below shows how being creative and using infographics changed our communications, taking people out of the normal classroom setting sparked engagement and promoting a growth mindset in order to influence others starts with me and flows through the organization.