Instructional Design and Education
I love to empower people with information that they need and help them learn to do new things. For many years, instruction design, education, and technical support have been a rewarding part of my professional life.
E-learning content is an area of focus for me. I’ve worked on educational courseware and supporting content in several formats, most recently as an instructional designer with SkillUp Technologies. At SkillUp, I worked on several courses related to technology subjects such as user support and cybersecurity. My major project, however, was developing a suite of courses to teach students how to navigate the employment market and get a job. Each course focused on a particular job type, but they all covered vital topics like how to research a field, how to look for job openings, how to write a resume, how to perform well in interviews, and much more. I developed these courses from concept to completion, creating the curriculum, writing the learning objectives, lessons, scripts, and assessments, and contributing to visual design as well.
Work samples from this role:
Work samples from this role:
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Previously, I worked as an instructional designer, writer, and editor with the Applied Digital Skills team at Google. In this role, I took ideas for lessons to teach digital skills through practical projects and designed the lessons, primarily in the form of scripts for video production. I scoped the lessons and decided what information to cover, then produced outlines and notes for other writers to flesh out. After the scripts were written, I did developmental and content edit on them, changing content when necessary and testing the demonstration procedures. I can't provide samples of the scripts due to contract constraints, but some lessons I designed and edited have been published at the Applied Digital Skills Personal Projects Collection (applieddigitalskills.withgoogle.com/en/personalprojects).
At McGraw-Hill Education, I consulted on applying instructional design principles and best practices to digital content for elementary school classroom use. I also co-led a team to develop an internal employee education project from the ground up, including concepting, designing, writing, building, and revising content, as well as publishing courseware and managing metadata using proprietary tools and systems.
As a technical editor working at Microsoft, I worked on a wide range of educational and support content. I worked on the Microsoft Knowledge Base and the Microsoft Official Curriculum. I also worked on software documentation for Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Microsoft Services applications, and other products. I've also worked on instructional web content, print documentation, onscreen help, SDKs and other documentation for software developers. I learned how to present information clearly and logically, how to structure it so that it makes the most sense and enables people to easily access and assimilate it, and how to "advocate for the reader" when analyzing informational content so that the reader's learning process is always at the forefront of the development process.
I contributed to and co-wrote two educational books with Ron Hale-Evans, Mind Performance Hacks and Mindhacker. These books are full of techniques for improving memory, sparking creativity, and learning other ways to use your mind more effectively - dozens of short lessons on a range of topics. Developing these books taught me much about how to quickly engage a reader with an entertaining presentation and how to pack and pare information into a succinct-but-solid format to "quick start" readers into developing a skill. (See the Writing & Editing page to read sample chapters I wrote for these books.)
As a volunteer and board member for Peninsula Hands On Art, I developed, wrote, and presented art education projects for schoolchildren, which were presented by docents to children in four elementary schools in Gig Harbor, WA.
At UW, I studied more formal instructional design technique to refine what I'd learned from experience. In my classwork, I learned how to design lessons and classes that were engaging and effective, how to work from a rubric to achieve specific educational goals, and how to analyze a target class to provide useful content that reaches people with different learning styles and needs.
As a volunteer and board member for Peninsula Hands On Art, I developed, wrote, and presented art education projects for schoolchildren, which were presented by docents to children in four elementary schools in Gig Harbor, WA.
At UW, I studied more formal instructional design technique to refine what I'd learned from experience. In my classwork, I learned how to design lessons and classes that were engaging and effective, how to work from a rubric to achieve specific educational goals, and how to analyze a target class to provide useful content that reaches people with different learning styles and needs.
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I developed a lesson plan for a class on using eBay, which was meant to be presented to a general audience at a public library. I researched the needs of this demographic and the technical aspects of teaching them, and explained them in a prospectus. Then I prepared a presentation about the class, and developed a set of handouts and a class evaluation to be used with it.
In another educational project, I designed a series of classes about digital democracy, meant as be part of a month-long intensive at the center on digital democracy, which would also entail other presentations and activities. I designed the class series and supplementary materials and activities, including program goals, a timeline for producing and managing the project, and a sample lesson. I presented this in a prospectus as well. |
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