I have been working as a registered physiotherapist in Ontario for over 10 years with experience in a full range of clinical settings. Having worked in the following areas of rehabilitation which include acute care, inpatient, outpatient, community and private practice I have gained a solid understanding of the Canadian health system. I purposefully sought out a wide breadth of experience to broaden my perspectives of the health care system and my skills as a clinician. In addition to the common sprains and strains, I have treated conditions ranging from sports injuries, joint replacements, trauma, spinal cord injury, stroke, brain injury and amputees.
In my current role as physiotherapist on a large multidisciplinary team I am accustomed to close collaboration between disciplines. The traumatic brain injury patient population that I treat is complex and requires our team to work closely together to optimize outcomes. Individual acknowledgement is seldom sought and patient-centered goals are the team’s priority. With this experience, I am committed to dissolving the distinct division of disciplines when it comes to product development for patients and families. New ideas and innovations come from different perspectives and are unified by a common problem.
In pursuing my Master of Educational Technology I am determined to combine my clinical experience with my growing knowledge of information and communication technologies. With my clinical experience as a physiotherapist I have a solid foundation of empathy which will be valuable to approach design thinking to ensure commercialized products have true applicability and usefulness for patients and family members.
My goals for the MET program are to learn how to systematically evaluate health care problems as it pertains to patient and family education to determine what would be the most appropriate technology medium to solve that problem, if in fact technology is the solution. I would like to build my knowledge of the affordances of various technology systems and be able to make sounds decisions for technology use that is supported by pedagogy in the design and commercialization of products. Ultimately, I aspire to add value to a multidisciplinary team consisting of anyone from researchers, engineers, graphic designers, analyst, and marketing consultants on innovative healthcare technology products.
My goals for the ETEC 565A course are multifaceted. With regards to Learning Management Systems, I would like to learn how to set up a course and understand what is involved in tracking the participation of the enrolled students/patients in order to identify those that may need more support. Gaining practical experience working with an LMS will help to build my confidence to be able to transfer my knowledge when dealing with different LMS platforms (ISTE 2008, 3a ‘fluency in technology systems’). By actively building a course through an LMS I hope to improve my understanding and abilities in basic coding and learn novel ways of adding interactivities to a course which are not limited to simply watching and answering questions from embedded videos. I plan to deepen my understanding of how students/patients can interact with the material and cognitively process multimedia (Bates 2014, p283, 287).
From an assessment perspective, I would like to know how to ask the right questions to gain a sense of the needs of my students/patients in order to identify learning gaps. Developing the skills to create useful assessment tools in the form of tests or quizzes will allow me to determine the most valuable learning content to achieve learning objectives. Through the identification of learning gaps, I would like to be able to design into the learning management system a way of supporting the students/patients. This may take the form of feedback from the teacher or peer support from online collaborative tools. Through this approach I strive to achieve ‘prompt feedback’ and ‘cooperation among students’ (Chickering & Ehrmann 1996).
Learning how to use social software effectively to create a community of patients for shared support who are dealing with a common condition is another goal of mine. I would like to understand what the design factors that make them effective are and what are the factors that deter patients from using these collaborative spaces.
Lastly, I would like to expose myself to some new multimedia programs that I have not used before to improve engagement in learners and improve the design of online content. I will choose a select number to use for my own course design and gain exposure to others through viewing what my classmates have used.
The resources that I will need to master the chosen technologies are time experimenting with the technology (Chickering & Ehrmann 1996, Emphasizes Time on Task), money perhaps if the online resources are not free to create upon signing up and support from the course instructor and classmates who may be more familiar with certain aspects of the variety of technologies. I will need to put forth purposeful efforts to engage with the technologies and critically analyze my design decisions throughout this learning journey.
References
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/ (Chapter 8 on SECTIONS framework)
Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S., C. (1996). Implementing the seven principles: Technology as lever. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), 3-6. Retrieved from http://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.htm
International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards-for-teachers