Instructional Design has been a large part of my adult life, whether it was creating a brand new training program during my time in the Air Force, or building a specialized homeschooling curriculum for my children while homeschooling them. However, there was so much more for me to learn about the art of Instructional Design, and this program was the perfect place for me to enhance my knowledge of learning theories and educational technology. I had so much to learn coming into this program!

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Compiling artifacts for my portfolio has really given me the opportunity to see how much I have actually accomplished as I enhanced my Instructional Design knowledge and skills, and I'm very proud of the work that I completed for each of my courses. My favorite assignments allowed me to express my creativity while also designing a fun, and effective learning environment for students. Sometimes this meant using Adobe Photoshop and Canva to create job aids, and sometimes this meant gaining in depth knowledge of Articulate Storyline in order to create engaging e-learning modules. 

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One thing that I wished I had spent more time on is creating instructional videos. That was the portion of the program that I struggled with the most, and that I would have spent more time perfecting if I were to do it again. In particular, I would have liked to have created more interactive videos, to give students opportunities to directly engage with the videos as they are viewing them. It would the passive element of watching a video into a more active element that allows the student to truly reflect as they interact with the video to strengthen their working memory and ability to reflect on their learning.

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In creating my portfolio, I would have been more organized regarding the AECT standards throughout the program. I should have created a folder for each standard. At the end of each course, it would have been beneficial to immediately correlate completed assignments with the relevant standard and competencies and noting them in a word document. There would be a word document for each standard, and it would include the artifact description, purpose, summary of the design and development process, as well as the competencies acquired through completing each assignment. Being proactively organized in this way would have made creating my portfolio easier and less time consuming while also being thoroughly detailed. It would also have ensured a greater quality of information to accompany each artifact. As it is, I had to review each artifact several times and try to remember the purpose and process of each assignment. In many cases, this involved me revisiting the corresponding course modules in CANVAS to refresh my memory.