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Future Goals Essay
In my first course in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program. I was introduced to the term lifelong learner. I realized immediately it was this attribute which has made me successful in the variety of careers and personal interests I have pursued. My work in the MAET program has not only improved my practice as an educator, it has also honed my skills as a learner. My passion for learning is often constrained only by the time I have available to spend on a topic. There were many times in my courses where I would have loved to spend the entire semester digging deeper into a topic we could only spend a week focusing on. Now that I am finishing my degree, I plan to continue my practice as a lifelong learner to accomplish my goal of providing quality ongoing education to medical professionals. I plan to focus my immediate future learning in ways that will allow me to; develop systems to distribute educational content efficiently, develop engaging and effective content, and review and participate in research to better understand the professional adult learner.
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Through both my professional and academic work I have been exposed to many different learning management systems and other technology platforms that allow learners to participate in online educational experiences. While there are many excellent options, I have not found a system that I believe works as well as I would like for my intended audience. To better meet the needs of my students, and address the issues of cost, security, and branding for my employers, I have decided to try and build my own system to access my educational content. I am planning to use WordPress and additional plug-in software to build the interface that will host and deliver my content. To be successful, I plan to spend a significant amount of time on two different websites I have found; learn.wordpress.org and wp101.com. Both sites contain a tremendous amount of material that should allow me to build the foundational knowledge I will need to be successful. I also want to learn more about the different systems used to host, code, and deliver all content on the web, and plan on completing several courses at CodeSchool.com. By having complete control over the way my content is presented and accessed, I hope to improve the experience my students have engaging in ongoing education.
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I have been employed creating online educational content for several years. After finishing my degree, I want to learn more about the three primary tools I use to author my content; Articulate Storyline, TechSmith Camtasia, and Adobe Audition. I have tried many different technology tools to create online educational content, and I believe that these three tools are excellent choices for my work. I believe the limitations I have in creating the best possible content, and applying what I have learned during my MAET coursework, is my lack of knowledge of the full capabilities of these programs. I have grown comfortable with my designs and workflow and believe I will only improve if I take the time to learn as much about the full capabilities of the tools I use. There are many resources and websites available for connected and shared learning on all the tools I use, both publisher and user based. Articulate has a very active training and user forum at community.articulate.com, which publishes more new training than I have had time to take advantage of in the last few years. Adobe also hosts an excellent Audition Community website with many tutorials on using their software. I believe the time I spend mastering my authoring tools will significantly improve the quality of my educational content.
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The MAET program provided my first real exposure to educational research. After spending hours searching for relevant studies in the MSU Library databases, I found very few that focused on the continuing education of adult professionals. Technology is playing a large role in delivering ongoing and continuing education to millions of professionals in the medical field as well as many other fields. I would like to play role in helping to guide best practice through analysis and sharing of research findings as well as participating in research studies. To accomplish these goals, I need to increase my understanding of statistics and research fundamentals, as well as continuing my review of any relevant research being performed. While I do not plan on pursuing another degree path immediately, I would like to enroll in a few preparatory courses over the next few years, beginning with a statistics course. I believe that through better analysis of my own work, the data I am generating can help guide my own practice. While I may turn to my local community college to build my foundation in statistics, I am also investigating statisics.com which offers online statistics courses focused specifically in areas that are important for conducting and interpreting educational research.
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The challenge in accomplishing my future learning goals will be making time for learning as well as meeting my other responsibilities. I am optimistic in that I firmly believe that if I accomplish the learning goals have I set for myself, I will be able to accomplish my professional goals and make significant improvements in my practice as an educator and to my profession of emergency medicine.