I’ve been a facilitator for most of my post-college time. About two years after earning my bachelor’s degree, I was off to China in my first full-time teaching role; I have been teaching since. Teaching has taken a few forms for me: English, workforce readiness, basic digital literacy, Office 365 skills, and expressive art making. The relationships I’ve made along the way and watching individuals develop has been incredible.
I made some big changes recently in terms of my career. I had to move. This caused me to reflect on where I want to go; what’s the next career move that will be challenging and fulfilling? I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the production-side of instructional design. Yes, I can build an effective educational program, I’m comfortable running classes, I’ve been awarded several grants for my work in these domains and have made a living doing it full-time; I have a deep understanding of the developmental psychology that frames adult education, but I have a wide spectrum of multimedia and course authoring skills that I’m ready to bring to the forefront.
Shifting my priorities and the focus of my job search has been an interesting exercise. I’ve realized that I was prolific with video production within the first few years of being at my last employer, when video production wasn’t my job…at all. Don’t get me wrong, I still did my job, but I also hammered (with all of my own equipment and software) on several video projects that my employer happily used. I needed the creative outlet, and my employer needed promotional and educational materials.
The signs for this shift in my thinking have been around for several years. When I was working on my masters of adult education at URI, I entered and won an app creation and pitch competition using Unity and C#. I’ve consistently had some long-tail multimedia project going. Projects like Endless Beautiful and Inner Harsh are a small window into that world; I’m realizing there’s so much that I’ve done over the past several years that I’ve taken it for granted as activities running in the background. That’s okay. I need to create. It’s who I am. It’s time for a shift though. It’s time to take all of this stuff, all of these skills, all of these avenues of creation, and flip the script. It’s time for course authoring and multimedia creation to be my day job. I’m fired up for this; and my gut tells me this is the correct course of action.