Program Assessment
For the past three years, I have felt supported and encouraged in my activities and courses. My advisor, Janette Hill, has provided support, advice, constructive feedback, and amazing opportunities to collaborate and learn. There have been multiple opportunities to meet other students and interact with faculty. The LDT-PHD and CIS-STUDENT-L listservs are very active with opportunities and resources from faculty and other people around campus.
Janette has also supported me through many changes in research direction. I started my graduate work with a focus on open educational resources. I eventually changed my focus to makerspaces in higher education, and finally landed on makerspaces in K-12. Janette encouraged me to find a research area that excited me and I appreciate her constant support through that process.
Several courses stand out in my mind as especially valuable experiences:
EDIT 8990 Doctoral Seminar was an incredibly valuable course. It was a comfortable space to have conversations about being a doctoral student in our field and to learn about being a researcher. I especially appreciated all of the speakers we had, including faculty and doctoral students who are at a later stage in their program. Our incubation sessions were also helpful, and I really appreciated how we were guided through our first year portfolio creation.
EDIT 9990 Critical Perspectives was my first exposure to critical pedagogy, and I found the reading to be challenging and thought provoking. This course made me think about the social justice aspects of academic research, and how we can examine teaching and learning in a way that changes the world for the better.
EDIT 9990 Technology Integration helped me dive more deeply into educational technology literature. We read a wide variety of articles and discussed them in class, and I learned to be a more critical reader of research.
EDIT 7000 Camp Dive was an amazing and intense experience. Working with campers in our makerspace camp session was my first experience observing students in that type of environment, and I am very proud of the writing I did about that experience. Observing the campers and then writing about it made me see how rich and complex qualitative research studies can be, and got me excited about potentially doing one myself.
Self Assessment
As I reflect on the past three years, I am grateful for the opportunities and experiences I’ve had. It was a hard decision to change my degree objective from Ph.D to Ed.S, but after much reflection, I know it is the right decision for me, my family, and my career at this time. I am proud and excited to achieve an Ed.S. I have learned to be a better reader, writer, researcher, learner and teacher as a graduate student in the Learning, Design, and Technology program. As I embark on a new adventure as a Senior Instructional Technologist, I feel confident in my skills and abilities due to the excellent work I have been able to do in this program.