I have been working at Pearson Education Canada in Toronto for the past twelve years, mainly focused on digital content development, authoring tool evaluation and staff training, and the end-to-end uses and abuses of learning applications and learning management systems used in Higher Education. My main areas of interest are with adaptive learning technologies, learning analytics, serious games, and how we might use data to improve content and knowledge retention.
This semester will be an interesting one with definite challenges. Support for students and instructors and support staff who are experiencing more existential strife than ever while keeping up with my 7th and 8th MET courses should be a great experiment.
Looking forward to hearing about your experiences and to share some ideas with you, and maybe throwing some ideas out along the way.
Hello Ben,
Working for Pearson must be an interesting job. I’ll be interested to read your posts during the semester. Certainly right now there are a lot of online tools and resources out there. Companies like yours are producing some excellent things. What I find hardest these days is making the right choices when it comes to resources as there are so many pros and cons to way for each one.
Hi Ryan,
It is definitely interesting, and also challenging. Choice in selecting content and tools is important for any organization, and it also creates far too many options. Rubrics to help us understand how to select one delivery mode or another are fine, but I wish there were fewer options with more people working towards making them better for the right reasons.
Hi Ben,
It’s a pleasure to meet a fellow Pearson colleague!
I always found it to be a shame that despite being such a crucial part of the business, content development, instructional design, and other shared services behind the scenes seldom get the appreciation that they deserve from students, instructors, and the general public. Still, in my relatively shorter time at Pearson, I’ve already seen so many people who are passionate about the work that they do for our students and academic partners, and continue to serve with pride behind the scenes.
I’d be very interested in learning from your knowledge and experience throughout the years at Pearson.
Cheers!
Hi Kay,
Nice to meet you! I think you’ll have an interesting perspective from POLS too, given that we will likely explore some of the challenges of delivering services while also trying to help our college/university partners manage fiscal pressures.
Best,
Ben
Hi Ben,
I appreciated reading about your interests as I am totally data-driven in my approach to building curriculum for students of all learning needs. Fortunately, I work at a school that is also data-driven in its approach to assessing student needs, etc. For this reason I am interested in learning analytics as I think data is the most powerful tool we have as 21st century educators.