Vision Statement - final

 I have made a few tweaks to my original vision statement, but I feel, overall, it is still relevant: 

The purpose of my current educational context - community development, specifically leadership and civic engagement - is to bring citizens together to build awareness, develop skills, and learn how to engage others.  

I will put this purpose into practice by ensuring educational workshops and courses are accessible and offer a supportive learning environment. This includes clear communication before, during and after the course. 

Secondly, I aim to facilitate learning with experiential learning activities, conversation and collaboration and by encouraging and creating space for reflection. 

The purpose for integrating technology is nearly imperative for adult education. Technology can increase accessibility for purely practical reasons - geographical availability, and because it saves time, cost, and travel. Additionally, it can span difference when working with learners with varying educational and language skill levels and disabilities (for example, using audible reading tools for less adept readers or captioning for hearing impairment), it can increase collaboration among participants by allowing the sharing of materials and documents. Technology provides limitless resources that can be used to support learning. Tech tools and applications can increase engagement, particularly in online settings, and can be used to demonstrate concepts. (One example of this might be sharing data on how a community has changed over time.)  

By offering more synchronous and asynchronous courses through our department, we can increase accessibility as mentioned above. By following best practices for online programming and utilizing principles of universal design, I intend to create courses that are as engaging as possible for learners. I hope to discover new apps and tools, and methods of using them, to co-create rich experiences with learners. 

What I have learned in this course has added “flesh to the bones”. Within my research of tech tools, I have inadvertently gained more knowledge around learning theories and how to apply them. The point of how crucial the educational design is, in spite of the tech tool, has become much clearer for me. I am thinking more about how a tool can be manipulated to best facilitate learning. 

I have a better understanding about open education resources, and look forward to using, and potentially contributing, to these more in the future. 

I am happy to report that my work team has begun to take a deeper look at universal design and how to better implement it in our work, partially due to my suggestion.  

One area that I want to develop and learn more about is assessment and evaluation.

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