Flight path

I am a third-year student in Public Health, returning to UVic to complete my second degree, and have been out of university for over 10 years.  My skills in interactive multimedia haven’t improved significantly over the past decade and I want to be able to keep up with my fellow classmates.  A lot of the courses required for my degree involve project planning, writing proposals, and presenting the plan.  Incorporating interactive multimedia into these assignments is a struggle for me and I want to become more competent.  

            In my professional life I work as an Infection Control Practitioner.  Part of my job is to educate healthcare workers on how to prevent the spread of disease.  Currently I utilize Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel but I want to expand my knowledge of other programs like Canva and web page design.  My goals are to learn how to incorporate multimedia design to improve educational tools.  Currently I am only able to produce textual material and am eager to expand into audio, visual, interactive, and immersive forms of communicating information.  Many of my coworkers are visual learners so I want to incorporate these elements into the tools I design.  This will hopefully create more engagement and interest in the education I provide. 

            As a student, professors often provide the option of creating info graphs, comics, videos, or writing a paper for an assignment.   I usually default to writing a paper because I’m not confident enough in multimedia design.  I want to change that as it will allow me more creativity as a student and give me the ability to create more impactful work.  In this digital age I believe it is easier to digest large quantities of information using multimedia rather than just reading text.  I take a lot of classes online and appreciate when readings are accompanied by videos as they help to solidify my understanding of a topic. 

Another learning outcome I am interested is understanding the logic behind how learning informs our interactive and multimedia experiences.  I don’t have any prior knowledge of this and want to further my understanding in this topic.  Knowing how the brain processes interactive multimedia experiences will influence how I design them.

            For me, the most dauting skill is GenAI use.  I have never used GenAI before and make a concentrated effort to avoid it for fear of being accused of plagiarism.  In this course I want to gain a better understanding of how GenAI is used to enhance your work and not do it for you.  GenAI is being used in the healthcare system and I want to keep up with this new technology.  My end goal is to become proficient enough with GenAI that I can work more proficiently.