Introduction

Hi there! My name is Carly Germann. I grew up in Bethel, OH, a tiny little town just north of the Ohio River, 30 miles east of Cincinnati, and I moved to Lexington in 2007 to go to college. I’ve had quite a journey during my college experience, but finally feel that I’m where I’m supposed to be. I came to UK my freshman year as a pre-pharmacy Chemistry major, planning to get my Bachelor’s degree and then go to Pharmacy school. I started taking Latin as my foreign language because it’s a very useful language for medical terminology (and mostly because I was sick of French). Part way through my first semester, I was dreading my Calculus and Chemistry courses, and couldn’t wait to go to Latin. My TA somehow or other convinced me to become a Classics major, and so I began two more years of taking Latin and Ancient Greek. I really enjoyed it, and my junior year I decided to apply for the University Scholars program, where you can take four courses your senior year that count for both undergraduate and graduate credit; a Master’s in Classics, in my case. Once I actually started taking the higher-level Latin courses, I realized that reading the language wasn’t what I really loved; instead, it was the puzzle of learning the different grammatical concepts, vocabulary, etc. I was miserable in my reading courses; I felt like I was back in Calculus!

Luckily, my junior year I also began working at the College of Arts & Sciences’ Online Education department. In this position, I work with instructors and our Instructional Design team to help design, develop, and sustain online courses. I work with many software programs and other tools, and I get to dabble in instructional design theories and concepts to make the courses the best that they can be. I absolutely LOVE my job, and after considering it my senior year, I decided to drop my Classics Master’s degree, go ahead and just finish my undergraduate degree, and apply for the Instructional Systems Design MS program. So here I am today, in my first semester of the ISD program!

I’m still not totally sure what I want to do with my degree, because I see two exciting aspects of ISD. The first is the ability to help university-level instructors make their courses the best that they can, so that they can reach as many students as possible. This is exciting because instructors can be very passionate about their subject, and can offer some fun challenges for how to use technology in news ways that we’ve never thought of. However, I can also see the excitement (not to mention more money) involved in corporate instructional design: working with new clients all the time, traveling around, learning new things as you create training programs, ability to grow in a company, etc. So we shall see where I end up after my two years of ISD study.

From this class, I hope to get a really good understanding of how people learn, how scholars have come to the learning theories that currently float around, and how these theories have changed and developed over time. Hopefully knowing the theories can help me to design courses that can impact as many people as possible.

As for me personally, I’m a pretty laid-back person. I enjoy hanging out with small groups of friends, relaxing, shopping, reading, and watching trashy reality TV (it’s my guilty pleasure). School and work are a big part of my life, because I love my job, and I am definitely a life-long lover of learning. I really like animals, and I currently have a hamster named Hammy, who is absolutely adorable. I’m a bit of a beer snob, and really enjoy tasting new and different types of craft and import beers.

I really look forward to the course! Thanks for reading my long bio!