Share a story about your best learning experience (could be a formal course or something more personal). Why did you enjoy it?

My best learning experience was when I started with Farm Credit Canada, and went through their 6-month learning program with the other new hires in my cohort to be able to excel at my role! I am now 3 months into my learning program, and comparing myself from the beginning of the program where I knew nothing, to where I am now, I’m capable of taking on more tasks at work and helping out my team. I can definitely say that I enjoyed the learning process!

Other than the satisfaction of receiving a bi-weekly paycheque for putting in my time, I’m enjoying the learning process because it involves the use of cognitivism, which is defined as “Cognitive theories focus on the conceptualization of students’ learning processes and address the issues of how information is received, organized, stored, and retrieved by the mind. Learning is concerned not so much with what learners do but with what they know and how they come to acquire it” (Jonassen, 1991b, p. 7). This really helped me with my motivation to learn the responsibilities of my role because it entailed a different approach where it forced me to make the knowledge meaningful, and be able to relate my prior knowledge and job experience to the new information that I’m being exposed to, making it easier to retain. This made my 5-year investment of attending Uvic worthwhile because it made me feel that I’m able to apply what I’ve learned in school to the job world.

My onboarding program involves the use of “Instructional explanations, demonstrations, illustrative examples and matched non-examples, which are all considered to be instrumental in guiding student learning. Similarly, emphasis is placed on the role of practice with corrective feedback” (Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J., 2013, p. 7). I was required to follow my e-learning via an online learning resource called WorkDay, as well as participate in live webinars where not only did I observe and learn the theoretical component of my role, but I was also presented and had to demonstrate the practical components of my role. By following the cognitive approach, it helped me “focus on the mental activities of the learner that lead up to a response and acknowledges the processes of mental planning, goal-setting, and organizational strategies” (Shuell, 1986, p.7). Being actively engaged in my learning program taught me the importance of goal-setting, planning my schedule and my ability to carry out tasks, and organizing my content delivery which corresponds to the tasks that I carry out. A good example of mental planning is when I was preparing for my first sales call. By participating in the online webinars and the scrimmage calls that were assigned to me, it gave me good practice in preparing and conducting research on what I’m going to say to customers, and organization skills in the sense that I had to plan out the timing and the context of questions in the right order of operations to uncover my customer’s values and goals.

Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (2013). Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 26(2), 43-71.

https://edtechbooks.org/lidtfoundations/behaviorism_cognitivism_constructivism

Link to my comment on my peer’s post: https://danielhwheaton.opened.ca/blog-1/