Professional Learning:
Ongoing / Continuing Education
The Why…
Poor professional learning has always been my pet peeve. As an individual who is in auto insurance claims and in management with my insurance company, I have two types of professional (ongoing) learning to complete on a regular basis: continuing education to remain licensed with the state and internal management training. I have attended multiple hundreds of hours in each category and my poor experiences in them led me to attack it head-on in this project. For continuing education, I have noticed there is a general inability to apply what I learn. For internal management training, I have concerns about the same (application) as well as the delivery method and pedagogy of the courses themselves.
If there is one thing that puts me in a bad mood, it is when others waste my time. I am a man who packs his schedule full and leaves little idle time in between commitments. I have no problem making time for a meeting that is a value-add for me, meaning that I walk away from said meeting with real and tangible benefits. The problem begins when I walk away from a meeting feeling like I wasted that time or that I just gained head knowledge that will never come in handy on a typical weekday. I would love to change the climate of our professional learning so it does not waste any time but rather improves ones working ability.
The What…
In response to the above, I created the following video to assess my organization’s current approach to professional learning and call my peers and management team to action to change our approach.
The How…
In undergraduate school, I produced a half-dozen videos and was a Production Director at the campus radio station, thereby editing and producing hundreds of radio commercials. I love nonlinear editing and was excited to have the chance to produce another as part of my graduate education.
In completing this video, I drafted the “script” myself… I started with a shell and ad-libbed when I saw the opportunity to further flesh out and further describe the topics. I did not want to just produce a “podcast” with all audio and no visuals as I love telling stories through pictures. Ergo, I obtained dozens of royalty-free photos from Pixabay.com and further narrowed it down to the images that “made the cut.” Speaking of the cut, I recorded the audio with an iPhone microphone and a recording app on my iPhone SE. There is a small amount of noise in the recording because I do not have an upscale, professional microphone to use. I then edited the audio and video on Lightworks, a professional editing suite with quite a few features on a free account. Below is a view of my editing suite, alongside a OneNote wherein I kept my script and concept. Random trivia – I initially drafted this to be a still-image blog but really felt drawn to take the project to the next level as a video.
Course Materials
Course Outline, Instructional Design, Schedule, Background Information for course
Collaboration & Self-Directed Learning Strategy
Who Leads What; Detailed Schedule
Professional Learning Slides
Handout / Resource - Part 2