PURDUE UNIVERSITY
Terri Krause Bio
Born and raised in Mishawaka, Indiana, I had the good fortune to be a graduating senior after Notre Dame opened its doors to women. My undergraduate degree is a BBA with a concentration in marketing, and my professional career alternated between academia, non-profit, and the private sector.
When I began the Purdue Learning Design & Technology program, I had been working with high school and college students full-time for five years. Our DreamsWork program (a third party college success initiative serving the Elkhart Community Schools) enrolled students beginning in the 4th grade and stayed with them throughout their educational career. I felt strongly after working with these students over the years that if we had hand-selected 100 who needed so much help getting through school and the college process, what about the 2000+ other students in our school system. How many of them will never go to college because no one told them they could/should?
Working closely with a specific group of children over time, especially those whose second language is English, made me realize I did not understand learning theory, or the dynamics of motivation—basic building blocks of learning. As a result, I may have had some impact, but, I believed it to be marginal at best. I knew from my time in IT, that instruction would move rapidly toward an electronic model. Once the technology and delivery systems catch up with our potential to create curriculum, I expected education to flipflop—the online Alternative School becoming the norm, and teachers becoming faciliators rather than the principal delivery system. Just to reach my students, I had to begin to intentionally deliver messages via Facebook and Twitter, text and email. I had to plan my delivery method and my message to fit within the parameters of the medium to achieve the results I desired.
I personally learn best when allowed time to digest and correlate input. I love to take concepts from one discipline and then examine the similarities and applications in other non-related fields: i.e., science and theology; or, structural engineering and computer programming. For me, learning is a game of sorts. It invigorates and refreshes. It makes me feel alive. That is what I want my students to experience.
The MSEd in Learning Design and Technology has been an incredible experience and one that has proven well worth the time and energy it required. I now understand what it takes to engage a learner, to scaffold them, and facilitate their construction of knowledge. I know that they need to connect the new information with prior knowledge, and that effective design can help move learners into deeper levels of cognitive thinking. I know that the systematic design of effective instruction takes into consideration the way people learn and process information. And, I know that the tools we have at our disposal must be properly chosen and systematically wielded if learning is to occur.
The LD&T program has generated as many questions (or more) than it has answered. But, I know I have a solid foundation on which to build, and a skillset that can only improve with use. I am looking forward to putting the concepts into real world practice, and researching further the impact and requirements of this rapidly changing environment facing today's learners and the designers of instruction.