Hi there,

It’s now week 6 of the academic calendar and to be quite frank, it hasn’t been as challenging as I thought. I was ready to run going into final year but I’ve found myself at jogging speed. I have had two assignment submission the past Tuesdays but coming from placement, deadlines are something that I’ve gotten much better at. Speaking of placement, I promised to share my experience in the last post so here we go!

I come from a Psychology background so when I speak of work experience, the most direct translation in peoples minds is along the lines of clinical or organisational psychology. However, I opted for a less obvious pathway for my year-long work experience. The decision didn’t stem randomly. I wasn’t too sure of how I wanted to specialise with my Psychology degree so I referred to my interests throughout the past years. I enjoy learning about technological applications and have taken up classes in web design and coding to explore this interest. I’ve also gained some interest in this field called User Experience (UX) Design & Research just by social media shares from my friends. To sum up, UX takes a user-centric approach to a product or service and I find it particularly interesting when focused on learning.

From these interests, I began looking into roles that included aspects of it. It was challenging and took up a lot of my time as the field of UX is fairly new and requires extended background experience. I ended up finding a role that extends this field to focus on education called Learning Technologies & Design.

My role centred around researching the current ways that education institutions house their learning and teaching. As the role was in Higher Education, I worked around universities policy and implementation of learning technologies. This means quite a few things but as an example, I tested for better ways to integrate course content onto a Virtual Learning Environment. The role is similar to UX as it focuses on what the students of a university need and want to better the teaching quality given to them. There were many opportunities to collaborate with staff and students which not only helped me in understanding people’s needs, it also improved soft skills such as communication and time management.

If you’d like to know more about the role I took during my placement, please feel free leave a comment below!