Friday, October 21, 2011

My life…in elearning

20 years ago I was a recent college graduate who had moved to Boston in the middle of a recession. I worked as the Assistant Aquatics Director at a JCC, teaching and coaching swimming. I had never heard of elearning and did not own a computer. I had never sent an email; I had never made a call on a mobile phone.


15 years ago I got a job as an instructional designer/multimedia producer at a company that created training programs delivered on CD ROMS. It sounded really glamorous to me. I learned my first ID model: instruct, demo, practice, assess. I had never heard of the term "instructional designer" before. We had our own proprietary development system that allowed us to use VIDEO.

10 years ago that same company was struggling to stay relevant as the world moved onto the Internet and the dot.coms were busting. We flirted with creating early knowledge management systems and went out of business the next year. We should have stuck with what we were good at. We had moved away from proprietary and were now using Macromedia Director. Meanwhile, I started going to massage school because I was getting bored with it all.

 5 years ago I had two small children and had gone back to work full-time in the biz after a few years of freelancing and doing massage work/teaching massage. I was working for a elearning company in MA and wrote my first blog post after admiring Brent Schlenker's blog. We created custom elearning programs in Flash. We also created our own proprietary Learning Portal. I had a cell phone and talked to people on it.

Today I am the VP of Learning Design at Kineo, a global elearning company. We do a lot of work in Flash and Articulate, but see ourselves as tool agnostic. We see the industry changing quickly as the marketplace matures and program requirements become more sophisticated. We are adapting as we speak. In my house, we have multiple devices including laptops, iPhones, iPads and iTouches. We don’t have cable TV, but download or stream most of our media content over the Internet. My children are adept at using these technologies. My son has math homework on the computer and thinks iMessage is the coolest app in the world. I regularly use Facebook and Twitter and now Google +. I check in on FourSquare and play Words With Friends with people all over the world on my iPhone.

photo (3)So. You there.  What’s your story?

6 comments:

Judith Christian-Carter said...

Nice one Cammy. What's my story you ask? Oh gosh, how long have you got? Because it sort of started around 30 years ago at the minimum!

Brian Dusablon said...

Thanks for sharing, Cammy!

Kim Green said...

How did you go from Assistant Aquatics Director to your first ID job? How did you get your foot in the door?

Thanks for sharing!

Cammy Bean said...

Kim, this much older post I wrote gives a bit more of a run down of how I got into ID itself - like most of us, it was by accident...http://cammybean.kineo.com/2007/04/memoirs-of-instructional-designer.html

Maery Rose said...

Wow! I'm jealous of the interesting work you've managed to get into.

Maery Rose said...

"Managed" sounds like a bad word. I'm sure there was a lot of work involved and your talent comes through in what I've seen you write about.