Sasha Griffith – Educator, Real-estate Developer, E-learning Designer, Life-long Learner and Instructional Designer.
Being a student at the University of the West Indies: Open Campus (UWIOC) and pursuing a Masters of Science in Instructional Design has had great implications for my personal and professional growth and career. Firstly, embedded within each course, were opportunities to reflect on one’s trajectory or course of action in the industry as well as one’s learning experience. These opportunities enriched the course experience, made me develop goals and metacognition and energised my thoughts. Learning for me became more meaningful as I started to see the bigger picture of not what the industry could do for me, but rather, what I could do for the field of Instructional Design. Consequently, it stimulated entrepreneurship and community-building ideas and made me more critical and analytical of my own learning process.
Secondly, the Masters of Science of Instructional Design and Technology programme has a great selection of courses that can be applied to many aspects of our daily lives. It is a multidisciplinary area of study and several elements can be taken and transferred to our lives, once the deeper meaning is revealed. Take for instance, the ADDIE model. This model can add an extra layer of structure to implement everyday tasks that does not exclusively apply to formal learning. In any area of our lives, we can benefit from it or have success once the model is followed.
Lastly, the programme of study creates cognitive dissonance and demystifies some of the myths of how people learn. I entered the course as a reserved, passionate, hard-working Spanish teacher who believed, for instance, that technology promoted learning and was useful in catering to the different ways students learn. Now, still with the same passion and vigor, but much more rebellious with my thinking, I am more critical and inquisitive. I no longer merely accept. I critique. I think of the learners, learning goals and higher-order thinking skills. I also rely on my own epistemology beliefs and experiential knowledge which have been nurtured and honed through being an active participant in the programme of study.
