giving too much is the preferred because you can always go back like you're given too much. It's like alright, come back, come back from that. But when you don't give enough, it's so much harder to push someone up to a point where they're giving their audience or their learners, just what they need.
Hello friends and welcome to the BLOC the building learning and organizational culture podcast. I'm your host Heidi Kirby. On today's episode, we have Alex Mitts, who is currently an Instructional Designer for California State University, Bakersfield and Bakersfield College. We share a similar backgrounds both having our bachelor degrees in English Lit and having a love and passion for music, theater, and
the arts in general. Today, we talk about how the arts and a passion for the arts and involvement in the arts can translate to real life skills needed as an instructional designer. So I hope you enjoy this episode after a brief word from our sponsor, bear Asana.
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Hi, Alex, how are you?
I'm great. How are you?
I'm doing well. Even though it's a rainy cold day outside. I'm feeling good.
Oh, wow. That's that's not the case. For me. I live in California, but I live in the bad like I live in the Central Valley of California, which is kind of the armpit so it's just bad weather all the time. It's either way too hot, or way too cold. So
I would rather it be way too hot right now. I live in Cleveland. So we're like getting ready for when's it gonna snow season?
Oh, man, that's one thing I'm glad I don't have to deal with I know for a lot of people snow is magical and cool. I it snowed in my neck of California once. And
it could just snow from like December 20 through the 30th and just be done. That'd be awesome. Christmas. A little bit of Christmas magic. Yeah, White Christmas. And that's it. All right. All right, Alex. So why don't you tell me a little bit about you, where you came from how you got into ID any fun facts you want to share?
Okay, um, let's see, way back way, way back. Let's go for it. So I'm sure later in this story, I'll go back to things like my adolescence and what brought me into having a skill set. That got me to ID but the professional side started as a classroom teacher, I was a seventh grade, English language, English language arts classroom teacher for many, many years bartended my way through college to get there, which was cool.
And very quickly, I started getting shuffled around in various school districts like oh, hey, you know how to use technology and the rest of our people don't or not the rest, but a lot of them don't. And need your support. Like you're more valuable in this role right now than directly serving kids. Like we need you to get teachers up to speed to serve more kids and have a larger pool of effect for the youngins. And so I did that for a couple of years. And that's basically instructional
design. Disguised as something else, I was called a variety of different things like Instructional Technology coach or teacher on special assignment with an emphasis and technology and yada, yada, yada. And so it was a lot of a lot of that in, you know, across various institutions and districts and
things. And so I didn't particularly enjoy the way that things were running in that regard it as it related to my job, specifically, a very little freedom in terms of, you know, it's like, oh, well, you're the expert. What are we supposed to do? It's like, well, you're, we're supposed to do this and then go, oh, well, no, we're not going to because we don't have the money or no, because I don't feel like it even though I asked you what you think we ought to do. And I got tired of that
really fast. And so I started kind of nosing around, like, do I want to go back into the classroom and just say, No, I'm not going to do this for you? Or do I want to move up the chain and become an administrator and maybe affect change at a larger level? And I think it was Matt sustaita instructional design extraordinaire who wrote an article about transitioning from teaching to instructional design, and that really kind of got me thinking. And I'm a person who is obsessed with
everything. So any new endeavor, I take on I just go for it. 100,000% And so I spend a lot of time researching what to do. And you know, I bounced around in those roles for a bit you know, through school districts and went back in the classroom for a year. I applied to you know, it jobs not a lot locally where I am, unfortunately, because I don't live in that part of California but So I did toss my name in as an as a higher ed Instructional Designer for my local college, local Cal State
University. And that was a while ago, that was her August, September ish of 2019. And so I, you know, I took on another English language arts teaching gig, and then COVID hit, and then we all got sent home, and we're teaching from home, et cetera, et cetera. And, you
know, I wasn't sure. If I wanted to continue teaching anyway, like, I was going to be one of those teachers who was like, you know, am I going to retire because they're gonna force us all to go back into classrooms with little super spreading teenagers. And just right at the right at the right time, I got the call from the college, they went, Hey, you applied for this job? Nine months ago, you still want to interview for it? I was really surprised. I was like, the you haven't filled it in
nine months? And the answer was, No, they didn't. It was weird. So historically, there have always been two at that college. And the one of the guys left, and they just let the other guy fly solo for nine months. And in the midst of COVID, and everyone having to transition online, including the colleges, they went, you know, we should probably hire somebody else right now. And so they called me and I interviewed along with like, four or five other candidates, and they liked me.
And now I'm here doing higher ed instructional design.
Awesome. That's great. Yeah. What about any fun facts?
Fun Facts? About me specifically?
Sure.
Um, let's see, when I was a teacher, and I was doing all the technology stuff, I was a regular presenter at the queue Conference, which for which was really big in California, I know, they have like little chapters here and there across the country. But like, it's surprisingly big here on the west coast. It's called computer using educators. And we have the big national conference in Palm
Springs, California. And we, you know, our districts pay for us to, you know, drive down and attend conferences and stay at a hotel, and blah, blah, blah. And so, one of my friends got a group of us together. And what we're presenting at this thing, like we know, enough to present here, like we got to a point very quickly, where we kind of learned all we had to learn. And we were just kind of showing up to network and bolster shaping
who we already knew. And so she signed us up to present and we went, Yeah, we're, you know, you can sign us up present, but we're probably not gonna get picked. Because it's, you know, there are tons of it's huge. It's a giant conference. And Google picked us up. And so we started presenting in their room every year, you know, under the Google wing. And so it was a four of us. And we've been presenting pretty much every year ever since this year is online. So it's a little bit
different. But it's kind of nice to be recognized at that level, you know, to like, Oh, hey, you have something to say, Let's present to our room of 600 people like Okay, sure. Wow. That's a fun fact, I guess.
Yeah. That's awesome. Very cool. Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to have you come on the show is because we have a similar background and similar interests. And in the last episode, I talked to Veronica Reed about finding your instructional design style. And so I think that, at least for me, and I'm sure for you, too, that the creative arts, and just having that background in the arts has definitely influenced my instructional design style.
So I wanted to just chat about that today and, and ask you a little bit about, you know, starting with your English major, what was that like? And how has that influenced your ID style?
Oh, man, I never thought that having an English degree would come in so handy. And I guess it's not the degree itself so much, but you know, the information you learn along the way to that degree, going back to adolescence, as I promised, I would I thought I was going to end up you know, making music and that was really the start of like, My Media journey. You know, I when I was when I was a kid, I was a you know, guitar player, singer songwriter played in bands and
stuff. And I thought, like, Yeah, I'm going to tour the world and play my songs and stuff. And you know, I got into bands and things and at the time, it was kind of in the early Audis, where I one of the things I really wanted to do was record my music, but booking studio time is crazy expensive. And so I thought I could probably just save some money and do this myself if I learned
how to do it. Right. And so you know, in one of my early teen birthdays, you know, I got a mixer like an audio mixer for my birthday, and I'm gonna look this I'm gonna look this background English and stuff, I promise. And so I did that. And I learned a lot about technology and audio and you know, more on that in a bit. But I kind of I kind of knew that making music or making a media in some form or another it was just something I wanted to do, regardless of
what capacity it was in. And so my brother who's 10 years older than I am, went through the path of going through getting his English degree becoming an English teacher and I was like, You know what, I could do that. And so like I got into teaching for all the wrong reasons and
stayed for all the right ones. I thought like, oh, summers and holidays, I can Monday through Friday, you know, decent health care, lots of vacation time and, you know, that'll afford me time to make art and make media and the end things and so I went through and got my English degree and became a teacher and fell in love with teaching and instructing, which is why I'm still an ID, I fell in love with
the kids, all that stuff. But so much of the English degree applies to things like this, I really surprised that when I look at other things, not to knock anybody specifically, but it's like, oh, the grammar is bad on this. And that really like knocks you down legitimacy wise. So having someone who knows where the comma goes is
kind of important. That kind of stuff, you know, making sure that words are sophisticated enough when they're supposed to be and not using a 10 cent word of when a five cent word will do in other areas to meet the needs, specifically, of your learners. And along with that, you know, even teaching comes public speaking. And I also have a strong background in community theater. And you know, being able to present you know, and right now I'm, there's not a lot of like, up in front of the room
presentation going on. But to having to be able to translate those skills to art, you have a camera and a microphone perform. Because you can't you can't teach somebody who's not
captivated. Right. And so a lot of the lots of those things come in public speaking communication, being an effective communicator of choosing which voice whether you need to be active or passive at the time making sure that your grammar is up to snuff, knowing which words that you need to find in order to communicate effectively the message that you're trying to send diction, you know, when it comes to narrating your own elearning those kinds of things. The English degree is really
versatile. And for a long time, it was kind of a kind of a joke, that, you know, oh, you have an English degree, that's great. You know, you can be a server in a restaurant, but yeah, dude, it's, it was so it was kind of crappy to hear those jokes all the time. But man, I am so glad I picked English as the degree and kind of filled in the other requirements later.
That's so funny. You just covered like, every thought I had going into this podcast today in like, two minutes. So that's great. I like I'm trying to figure out where I want to start with the music or the like, you know, having an interest in music, first and foremost, to go back to your
adolescence. You know, I remember even as an elementary school student having the little tape recorder with the microphone and just recording my friends and I practicing for the musicals we were in and all that good stuff, which led to then obviously, once computer started to become a thing like learning the, you know, basically whatever the version of Audacity was, at that point, right? I
remember exactly what they were, it was cool Edit Pro was the very first incarnation of, of Audacity. And I can, I'll keep going, I'll get into.
Yeah, but just, you know, recording, I didn't learn how to record audio or edit audio from instructional design. I had known that years before, I didn't know, Photoshop from instructional design. I had learned that back in high school because it was a fun class art class to take. And, you know, my friends and I, my friends and I post camcorder, video movies, started with the Windows Movie Maker making our own movies.
And, you know, so all those skills that come from having a love for theater and music are absolutely translatable into instructional design.
Yeah, and I'm really glad, and I'm going to probably talk to him and it's probably touch on something that's a big nono to touch on, but I'm going to do it anyway. So, you know, going back to Oh, the first version of Audacity was called Cool Edit Pro. And the reason that I got any good at these things was in the early audience, it was really easy for
people to crack software. And so I attribute a lot of my expertise in technology, of which, you know, none of which now that I'm at a point where I can say that I have quite a bit of is attributed to piracy. And like I said, it's a no no to say that, but you know, I would hire things like digital audio workstations, and I would pirate things like, video editing software, like right not gonna say the name of it, because they're gonna hunt me down and make me pay years of back
licensing. But you know, and it took years and years and years for people to just go well, why don't we just do a subscription model rather than have this kid pay $400 to learn this video editing software? Now? I can pay 20 bucks a month if I want to use Premiere or debt, you know, or? Yes, well, no, it's audacity is the free one. I'm talking Adobe Audition. Audition. That's it. Yeah, the first version of audition was cool Edit Pro. That's Oh, gotcha. Little retcon
there. Yeah. Cool. Edit Pro was bought out by Adobe. But yeah, I did that for years and years and years. I worked on pirated things and free licenses that I could just renew and only later If that I learned that those companies usually kind of looked the other way on that kind of thing. And even then there are some companies now, especially in the realm of ID who look the other way on those things.
Because when you learn it for free, you know, when you keep re upping your free subscription or your free trial, and then you get hired on as an ID, they ask you, well, what are you comfortable with? Well, I'm comfortable with this program. Cool. Let's buy it. They'll make it up on the back end anyway. And Adobe did that for years and years and years before adopting the subscription model. And so yeah, I mean, but then as an adult, you start making money and you buy those things for
real. And then you start honing your skills going back to the theater, when people have a problem that they need to solve. And I was really lucky to get lumped in with a group of people who had some really lofty goals. And they went, we want to do this. And I was like, You can't do that. It's like, Well, why not? Because you need X, Y, and Z. And they went, alright, cool. Let's get X, Y, and Z. And we want to do this. So how can you can you make it happen? And that's, that's how you learn a
lot of stuff. It's like you have this seemingly insurmountable problem. And, you know, it's kind of the nature of the instructional designer to either find a solution or a workaround. And that's, that's, that's one thing that theater really got me good at was like, Well, can we do this? It's like, logically, logistically, no, but we're
gonna try. Yeah, we're a community theater or we're better yet a public high school theater with a super limited budget. You know, how do you make somebody look like an old person? Oh, yeah. You just put the baby powder in the hair trick or, you know, different ways to work around the problem? No, that's a really good point. I like that.
Yeah, we did a we did a musical called Rock of Ages. I'm not sure if you're familiar with its with Bowie. It was like we were getting me to do to rock we need to do Rock of Ages. It's like, okay, cool. It's too Rock of Ages. It's like, well, we we're in a three quarter theater. And the the walls are all like shiny, reflective drywall, and it's it seats at people. How do we get a live band in there while still making this work? And the answer was, you don't like it's a
feedback nightmare. You can't get live drums in here. You know, but we did it. We did, we did a whole production of that kind of thing in this little teeny, tiny black box theater. And it was a lot of problem solving. But it was definitely one of the highlights of my highlights of my artistic time. And yeah, like all that stuff translates is, you know, we have a problem we need to solve, you know, part of the ADDIE model is just the you know, what do we what do we need to solve this?
How do we do it? I don't know yet. But there's somebody who's hired on to figure it out.
Absolutely. I think the other thing that I gained from theater experience was just kind of this. There's a sense of leadership, right? So part of the reason I got into instructional design, my kind of lofty goal is to be chief learning officer someday, you know, I love the design work, but I don't know if it's what I want to do for the forever, right, like, I'd kind of like, I
like to boss people around. So and I realized that through theater, my senior year of high school, I directed a play, you know, it was an opportunity for a few different seniors to direct a play. And typically what would happen is they'd have like two or three actors, because, you know, they didn't want it to be too unwieldy for the person to, you know, be trying to wrangle their peers into some sort of cohesive
production. And meanwhile, I picked like, 10, a cast of like, 10 people, right, and just like went for it, because like, all my friends wanted to be in my production. So I was like, Come on, guys. Let's do it. And it was challenging. But I think as like a teenager coming into your own and coming into adulthood, like that kind of power, it's, it's, it's a little, it's a little addicting. But it was also like, I can do this, right? Like, I can make these people better and do what they need to
do. And so I think that really does translate into instructional design. You have to learn how to command a room, offstage, but also onstage, if you're in a duet, or, you know, if you're the only one on stage, that's your chance to command the audience. You don't want them looking at the guy coughing in the first row, you've got to be able to have a presence enough that people are listening to you and they're buying in and the same thing is true with instructional design.
Yeah, it's it's entirely true. And in fact, it's almost essential. You know, I haven't been in a in I haven't been in a situation too often where, you know, my peers and my colleagues have not successfully
done that. But I have been in an audience where presenters have not successfully done that and you know, it served you know, being a being a theater not at this point has really, you know, it served me really well and rooms full Have 12 year olds because you know, that's really easy to grab their attention and just kind of get them to go with
you. But one thing I've always said is, it's a lot harder to teach adults than it is to teach kids just because when you teach kids, you know, even 1213 years old, it's like, Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we're doing this today. And they go, Yeah, all right, that's you said, that's what we're gonna do. That's what we're gonna do. As adults. It's alright. Ladies and gentlemen, we're doing this today. Why? Why should I listen to you? You know, the I don't want your I'm
here for the paycheck man. Like, this is an extra training that I don't have to be at. But I know I'm getting paid for it. And so, yeah, like it's as an ID, myself, and especially now that I'm new to it, and have only really worked in a virtual environment. It comes in handy. I know that instructional design has lots of facets like ELearning Development and in person trainer and such things
like that. And so it's nice that it has such a set of different roles that you can fall into, because in person training is not necessarily for everybody. And it's not necessarily for everyone in such a way that can be done well. Because like I said, I've seen people do it well, and I've seen people do it not so well. And it really does take that kind of practice and commitment to the performance, if you will, you know, like
we're, we're trainers. But that's, you've got to, you've got to turn it on, if you want people to hear.
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. And it's the same thing on the stage in the classroom, and then in front of a bunch of adult learners, right. It's the same in each area that you have to, you know, what you're talking about has to be interesting enough for the people to pay attention and buy in, and hopefully learn something, right.
Yeah, and I mean, it takes a lot of commitment to to do that kind of thing. And only, you know, only recently have been having to realize that giving too much is the preferred because you can always go back like you're given too much. It's like, Alright, come back, come back from that. But when you don't give enough, it's so much harder to push someone up to a point where they're giving their audience or their learners just
what they need. Like, if I bring a certain energy, and I bring, you know, 125% it's so much easier to dial that back to exactly 100, then, if someone's only 80%, they're trying to make up that extra 20 somewhere else?
For sure. And do you find as someone who has the background that you do that people are sometimes like, Alex, this is a lot, this is very dramatic, we need to dial it back a little bit.
No, in a professional environment, I've never actually experienced that. In fact, it's almost always, it's almost always more welcome. Sure, when I was doing school districts and stuff, I used to train teachers on a regular basis, you know, after school, before school, on the weekends, that kind of thing, kind of the drawbacks of that particular roles, you'd spend your week preparing, and then you'd spend the off time quote, unquote, the teacher off time actually
delivering. And so I find that, you know, the only thing that would be too much for my learners would be too much information. Sure, it was never too much energy, you know, the energy was always I was like, alright, Saturday morning, you know, lamp, the bear claws and the coffee, we're here to learn
something. And then when you turn it on, and you give the performance and you embed some humor and do some of this and do some of that, when you really throw the spice on that kind of performance is really just a delivery of instruction. But I mean, they're synonymous to me. That's when you really hook your learners and generate buy in to, that's another thing that's really hard to generate buy in from your learners. It's like, well, we're learning this, but I don't care. Or we're learning
this, but I don't agree. If you can sell it, you know, and not even sell it. I mean, if you if you don't believe it yourself, you probably shouldn't be delivering the instruction. But if you if you do if you don't, as long as you can pitch it in such a way that this is the right answer. That's the buy and you've got to communicate, you know, the functions are one thing, like you can learn functions along the way, you know, you can get initial tasting of the functions like
Alright, cool. I'll I know, I see how he does this thing on the screen now. And I'll forget it by tomorrow. But I can go back and practice it. But really just the gumption and the commitment to a new program or the commitment to a new piece of knowledge or a new method of doing something is the first and probably most important step. And you can't do that unless you deliver that energy. I think
there's something infectious about having passion for what you do and what you're presenting. There. There just is and if you can relate relay that to your audience, they they see it, they get it. So I want to go back to the English major for a little bit. Yeah. I don't know about you. But I studied English for my undergrad and grad degree. And in our program. We didn't get to read a lot of what you were quote unquote supposed
to read. And we read a lot of you know, you're kind Have at the instructors mercy, write whatever they pick for you to read. And so I missed out on some of the classics like Catcher in the Rye To Kill a Mockingbird. Those are some books that I have never read yet I own them, I plan to read them someday. But you know, I missed out on some of the classics.
However, I did have classes like I had a class called American regional realism comes where we just read all about different people from different areas of the United States and their experience. And I think that that reflecting back on it now, before this podcast, it really informed how I designed instruction, because I was so used to reading about people's
lived experiences. So when thinking about the learners, or also when thinking about, you know, the idea of empathic design, where you kind of have to put yourself in the learner shoes before you even begin the design process. It's something that really affected me and influenced me that I didn't really think about or connect at the time. Can you think of anything like that, that you read or saw in your English studies that you didn't quite realize, but maybe it affected your ID career? Now?
I'm trying to think about my English degree. I mean, I could probably talk, you know, at length about how being a classroom teacher led me ultimately to that same conclusion. Sure. I'm trying to think of what in the undergrad English career may have led me to something like that, I think, I don't know, I think I was very metacognitive. In that time during undergrad just because I wasn't sure whether this was really what I wanted to be
doing. Or, you know, I was bitter at the time I was a much I was a very bitter young lad. grown out of that sense. And, I don't know, there were times where I got to get to certain classes. And regardless of the content, the instruction really stood out to me. And I don't think that was necessarily because I was on my way to becoming a teacher. But I think I was showing up expecting one thing and sometimes ended up
getting another. And you know, I can think of like a colonial lit class when I was at the community college here before transferring to the big university. I was just boring as boring as hell. And I fell asleep a lot. And I ended up getting a C in that class. And looking back on it now, the subject matter would have been incredibly interesting, I would have loved to have learned about that. But the delivery was terrible. And the homework was terrible. And the reading was
actually pretty good. But the class itself was just really bad. And, you know, I can think of other instances where I ended up in a Victorian literature class. And it was really only Victorian literature in name and era, because the professor kind of turned it into like a feminist lit class and I'm a I'm a very staunch and you know, fervent feminist myself, but it was really weird to, like, get baited and switched to like
that. And I think as a learner, like that kind of those kinds of things stick with you, where it's like, okay, like, I'm cool with feminist lit, but I didn't say I'm big on feminist literature. I'm big on feminism as a whole. But I didn't sign up for a feminist lit class, I signed up for a Victorian with
class. So I felt I felt, even though even though feminism itself is something that I feel very strongly about, I almost felt adversarial to the class because what I wanted, or it wasn't what I needed, or wasn't what it was advertised as. So I find that those kinds of college experiences make me a little more connected to what a learner is feeling when they go into
something like this. And I've spent a lot of time as a learner in college or out of college or, you know, doing elearning modules for jobs that are required because of compliance issues or whatever. But yeah, I think, I think learning I don't know if it would even be specific to English, necessarily, but sure, that just the college experience itself, really, I don't know made made a lasting impression on what I want as a learner, and now I can give that to learners.
I think that's a good reminder. Like, hey, listeners, think back to when you were in college. Think about all the classes that you hated. For whatever reason. Don't do that to your learner's, right. Here's the challenge. Please don't do that to your learner.
Yeah, yeah, it's hard. And I was very fortunate to have like a community almost like a cohort. And we would move through and take all the same classes at the same times. And so when things like that would come up, where we would have, I don't know, kind of a bait and switch class or the class wasn't
going as we planned. Having that community really helped, which is kind of tough and instructional design because you aren't because unless you're designing a learning for a group of 30 You know, if you're doing something elearning, which is inherently a solo project, or if you're designing a learning for a group of 30, who only meet once If you don't have some sort of camaraderie, it's hard to build in that fallback of like, well, this, this ended up being kind of crappy, but at least we
have each other. That's a, that's that's a tough one. You can't really rely on too much. Yeah, it anyway.
Absolutely, that's true. So I want to move into ID a little bit and talk about we talked a lot about how we were informed by different things. But let's talk about the cool projects that maybe you get to do as an ID now that are super creative.
Let's see, what do I so when I got hired on at this California State University, you know, I'm normally used to slowly wading into the water of a new job, like Alright, we're gonna get you in, and we're going to show you the ropes and here's the break room with the coffee machine. And here's, here's Janice, the lady at the
front. I don't know why. But I do know that just that kind of stuff is usually what I didn't like what I expected a first week at a new job, just because that's kind of how it's always been. But they called me to, you know, after the interviews and yada, they're like, oh, great, cool. You have the job. You know, please call your school and give notice, you know, we want you to start, you know, there's like on a Wednesday or something's like, Alright, cool.
Yeah. When When do we start? Do we start the first of the next month? Do we start? You know, what do we do? They're like, No, no, we want you to start Monday. Like, oh, okay, yeah, I can probably I can, I'm sure I could do that. That's, that's fine. So I, you know, I called made sure it was all fine and dandy and whatever. And I principal, you know, gave me a nice goodbye. And so I started Monday, and they went, right, cool. This is the situation. All instructors are going online for the fall
term. You have to train them all in Canvas and zoom and help them set up their courses and it's the x y&z You know, and but one of the things we want to do is we have summer sessions of like andragogy, pickle, things that we want to communicate for instructors who have never taught online before. Let's start, let's, let's divide up the work. I mean, I'll take a training on this topic, the other guy will take a training on this topic, what do you want to train about? I was like,
Yeah, I don't know. But at the time, I was getting the impression that a lot of instructors wanted to do synchronous, online learning. And even though that's not necessarily my jam, I'm not a proponent of synchronous online learning, unless there is a purpose for doing so. Sure. But it was a big demand among our faculty. And so I was like, alright, well, I mean, if they're going to do it, they might as well learn how to do it, right. And so I developed a training for my university
called the Temple of zoom. And it was all Indiana Jones themed and colored and lots of stills from the movie and little plays on words. And I spent, I almost feel like I spent more time developing the the cohesion of the slides rather than pumping in the information. But it was really great. Like it went off
without a hitch like we. So basically, we as an instructional design department, we call ourselves the Faculty Teaching and Learning Center, we had the day to present and so our first person would do like, take the morning session, do a half hour break, we would jump into the same Zoom Room and do the next session for an hour and then take another half hour break. And then third person would jump into the Zoom Room. And I was the last session of
the day. And so I was slated for an hour, you know, here's my template, zoom, here's an hour, here's all the things, here's what the buttons do. If you've never used zoom before, at the end, here's some best practices to use while teaching
synchronously at the end. Here's some even more optional paid upgrades, if you want to spend a little money out of your own pocket to become a little more media tech savvy, kind of like what I've got going on right now with a nice camera and microphone with a boom arm that's attached my desk, that kind of stuff. And so at the end of that hour when I cool, like I'm going to dismiss you and I had like 100 participants in this Zoom Room, which was kind of cool. And it wasn't a
webinar, either. It was like, you can open up your mic and talk to me if you want to. Oh, wow. Yeah, I know. It's risky. And yeah, and and so at the end, I went alright, cool. Like, that's it. I'm gonna stick around if you have questions or want to discuss things further. And you know, we can do that for
a couple of minutes. And so that 60 minutes was up, I thought, you know, 15 more minutes and we're going to be good to go a couple people have questions that 60 minutes turned into two and a half hours of just picking my brain asking me things. I had a couple of people open up their mics to kind of fight with me a little bit about my what my recommended best practices, and I kind of had to kind of had to shut them down a little bit. It was kind of it was super awkward, but it was handled
pretty well. And yeah, so that was that was my first that was literally like week two of my new job as an IT is as a first time Id and I'll say first time in quotes because you know, Instructional Technology coach, teacher and specialist Sure, but it's my first real like on my resume calling myself an ID type of thing. So that right, that was that was the first experience
and that template is very cool. I've seen it it's it's hard to keep people's attention you know, we hear all this the cool term for it now resume fatigue, but really what it is is just people sitting at home are distracted right? People sitting at work are distracted you know, there's there's different levels of distraction everywhere. You go. And I think that part of keeping people's attention is definitely
that visual aspect, right? Like the theme, the, you know that the bright red and orange you have going on in that theme, you know, you got to keep people's attention.
I think the last 30 minutes of that question session of that two and a half hour timespan was spent talking about audio. And one of the things I think I embedded in the temple of zoom thing was that audio in any situation where you have a an audio visual component, I will argue 10 times out of 10, that your audio component component is way more valuable than your video component. Because I mean, you can have a
cool zoom. I mean, even if you don't opt for the virtual background, like let's say you dress up your room, which clearly in this call, you can see that I haven't. But you know, let's say you do the bookshelf and have the art on the wall. And it said, but your your microphone sounds like this. You know, as I move for my podcast listeners, I've moved it away from my face, and you can hear just how bad it sounds. And could you sit through two and a half hours of this? Probably
not. But you can probably sit through two and a half hours of this if the content is engaging, if your speaker knows what they're talking about, has the correct inflection and musicality in their voice. And you know, even though podcast listeners can't see this, what is directly behind me is atrocious in terms of visual real estate, like there is nothing cool going on behind me.
Oh, Yeah, same here, I'm in I'm in moving mode, I've got a bunch of bossy that I see.
But the audio quality is nice and fine. And it's for a podcast, but like, you know, that's that's part of the Zoom fatigue too, is that, you know, there's a lot that's not going on, that could and should be going on when you're doing things synchronously and addressing those issues. And being willing to jump in and try those things is kind of
important as well. But I actually read an interesting study to just to kind of tack this on at the end before we shift topics, again, is zoom fatigue is real, because it's not like real human interaction in the sense that no matter how good your connection is, there's always some bit of latency or
delay. And so whenever I say something to you in real time, like if you respond with in person that would have come literally milliseconds, faster, almost indistinguishable, but our brain kind of caches that away. And that's really what tires us out is we'll say something, and we don't get that direct. And I think that's I read that and it kind of blew my mind where no matter how good your connection is, no matter how good your microphone is, or
your video quality is. That little bit of latency is a red flag for us that this is still not entirely real. And that's, that's the hard, that's a hard
thing to deal with. I think just subconsciously I think that's where, and I can't I haven't stopped thinking about it since I think that's where a lot of my own fatigue comes from, because I can be on the computer for eight hours a day, you know, watching videos, creating media, doing things for people, you know, responding to email, tickets, et cetera, and I'll be fine. But zoom fatigue is an entirely different thing, I think, because that plays a big role in
it. Yeah, now I'm gonna think about that all the time. No,
I've broken. I've broken you. I'm sorry.
Luckily, I don't have a lot of zoom meetings. So that's good. It's why zoom theatre
doesn't work. Because they're just they're just a small, there's just a bit.
I, I've always wondered how like, all these different people who are releasing these lovely zoom like orchestra videos, I'm like, how are they doing that? There's such a lag. How are they doing that? How are they getting this to sync up?
Post processing? Right? Post processing? You got to pay the big bucks for it. Yeah, that's right. You can't do it in real time, you have to post.
That's where like the Boston Philharmonic produce something like that. But if you get five of your friends together, it's a hot mess.
Unless you've got an instructional designer friend who knows how to do all that post production.
There you go. There you go. Let's say we have some friends listening who are going oh my gosh, this is so my background. These are so my interest. I'm just now getting into instructional design. What is a tool or a method or a process that you would have like the quote unquote, newborn instructional designer, start with to kind of use their background in the arts to get some leverage forward in instructional design?
I would say there are a couple of things and this is going back to the be obsessed because I you know, not not trying to toot my own horn because being obsessed is great in doing things like really shortening the learning curve, not necessarily making it less steep, but you know, just condensing the timeframe because I learn a lot about a subject in a very in a much shorter amount of time than the average person will take to learn about that subject. So I can kind of
distill it down. You know, this is the fringe benefit of my obsession is, you know, I may not sleep well at night, but I can at least distill it down for our friends who want to maybe take a faster track. First and foremost network. That's a big one just because I'm I've always been really bad about asking for help. And only in my recent adult life have I gotten better
about asking for help. And so reach out to somebody who may already know or reach out to a stranger or reach out to a person who might have already have some clout and go, Hey, you know, can you help me and I will gladly pay you for your time.
And I have a I have a near and dear instructional designer friend of mine, who we both know, and I don't know if I want to shout her name out, because I don't want random IDs, flooding, flooding her LinkedIn inbox, our friendship started out with, Hey, I saw on LinkedIn that you posted that you were helping a friend who landed their first IDX gig. Do you mentor instructional designers? And more importantly, do you do it
per hour? Like how much per hour would you charge me to do this, and she went, I'm not going to charge you per hour. And so she did kind of take me under her wing. And I'm still in regular contact with her. And I'm very privileged to call her a friend. And that's first and foremost is get help. And that's an all facets to you know, like even with the arts background, like you know, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt never had acting lessons. But our Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt
really good actors. No, I mean, they may have awards, but would you really consider them good actors? No, the ones that you really consider good, have gotten training and coaching and have gone to school and have studied it formally. And that's kind of a big one, too, is you know, if you're going to get formal training, get formal training, not not to say like, go get your Masters or go get a certificate or work with people who know what they're doing. And that's a big one been paid them
for their time. Secondly, if our friends are looking to get into it and looking to leverage, like a theatrical or a media background, the reason that I got into like Instructional Technology coaching or teacher on special assignment was because I volunteered for those things that interested me. I didn't get paid extra I didn't, you know, I didn't. Back when I was a teacher. I mean, when I was a classroom teacher and took on those extra bits that ultimately landed me in those
roles that were paid. It was a lot of, hey, you seem to be the person in the room that knows the most about this. Can you put something together? In your free time? Yeah, we're not going to pay you. Yeah, there's no extra compensation, you just get to be the person who knows how to do it. And, yes, always answer yes to those questions, unless you're one of those people who really need that time to like, veg out on the recliner, and open a cold one and watch, you know, Criminal Minds or
whatever. But if you have the opportunity to get your feet wet in volunteer work, I guess I don't know if volunteer works the right thing. But you know, if you have the opportunity to become the expert, with no extra pay, that will move you closer, because then you can take something that you develop and this is tip number three, throw it into a portfolio. And that's it. That's the other thing too is you know, just to recap real quick, reach out to people who know more than you because you
won't learn it. You can. You can, you know, buddy up with people who know less than you and you can explain it to them and reinforce the knowledge but you'll never learn anything new unless you buddy up with people who know more than you and pay it forward to so you know, it comes down to you bring it down to someone else, volunteer for those things that will get you the relevant experience. And then throw it into a portfolio because employers really want to see that you can walk the walk.
And it's that it's that old cycle of you know, you need this. You need job experience, but how am I going to get this without prior experience, like, if you're not gonna hire me for the job, that's going to get me the prior experience to get me to the next job. It ends up being the cycle of well, I'm never going to get hired. And like that's not true. If you can put together a portfolio showing that you can walk the walk, and you're willing to put it together on your own time.
That's a big indicator to an employer. It's like wow, this person really took the time to build a project and Articulate Storyline or in rise or learn how to use Camtasia to edit video or Wow, this audio is clear and crisp, they must really know what they're doing. What's their education look like? Wow, no formal video training, no formal audio training. That's kind of interesting. But man, they really came a long way on their own. So yeah, reach out, get
help, volunteer. And when you're all done, put it in your portfolio, put it on your resume, put it on your LinkedIn, let people know that this is what you really want. Because there's a lot of people who will do it and you know, once again go into the be obsessed or be average thing. There are a lot of people who will dance around it. There are a lot of people who go I'm going to do that and
then just won't. So if you can really follow through on those ideas, people will start reaching out to you know, I I now have my full time gig in higher ed. But my inbox is you know, my inbox occasionally lights up with Hey, I've got this contract. Can you do it? No, I can't you know, if it's full time work I simply cannot. If it's part time work, let me know. But you know those things if you show people that you want it, and you show people and you
actually do the work. I know that's really basic but actually do the work.
No, that makes sense. And I think to volunteer work, doesn't have the same amount of red tape that sometimes a full time job can
have, right. So if you're looking for somebody to put in your portfolio, and you do the volunteer work, you have full creative license, you get to really use your creativity without the red tape of budget or timeframe, or, you know, there might be due dates and certain things to work within, but you have a little bit more creative freedom I found in in kind of that volunteer space. Yeah,
or even if you just build something for yourself, like, one of my portfolio pieces is just to show people that I know what these buttons and storyline do. And it's a Star Wars project. And I get compliments on that all the time. It's like, Oh, I like your portfolio. I remember your Star Wars project that was kind of cool. And was really just all about, like revealing layers, and making sure buttons worked and that you had active layers versus you know, it's I'm not
gonna get into it. But everyone's like, Oh, yeah, your Star Wars thing and your portfolio, that was really cool. And that, honestly, is the difference in going, you know, even tying this into arts and theater. That's the difference between getting the job or getting cast, and not, you know, granted, that's that's the thing is, you know, you there are zillions of instructional designers just like there are zillions of musicians and zillions of actors and zillions of whatever creative individuals
there are. And if you can walk the walk, then you have met the bare minimum to show up at the starting line. And that's something that needs to sink in is there are tons of people who can do it just as good, if not better than you. And you just and you have to be aware of that, that you have to be good enough to compete. And that really just means showing up to the starting line. The difference between hired and not are being cast and not is being a one a good candidate to work
with. So make sure you interview well. You know, I wholly believe that there were way more qualified people that I was for this job, but you make a good impression on an interview. People want to work with you, you know, if if you're 80% and a likeable person, but 100, but you're up against 100% and a jerk, I'm gonna I'm gonna hire that 80% 10 times out of 10 and fill in the other 20. But also to having a piece that stands out, you know, if you're cycling through, it's like, Alright,
cool. Who was on the list? I was like, Well, Jeff was on the list. It's like, very cool. Jeff was good. I don't really remember Jeff, maybe let's pull up a picture. How's Alex is like, Oh, this is pretty good. He's almost there. He's the Star Wars guy. Right? Yeah. Right. And so like having that little label, like being able to stick out in someone's mind like that. I think that's going back to the
creative licensing thing. If you're gonna build a portfolio or build pieces, have fun with it, you know, it works on two levels. Number one, if you build something boring, you're gonna hate it the whole time and question whether or not you really want to do this. But if you do something fun, it's fun along the way. And it's fun for everyone else who might want to hire you along the way too. So I don't know there's this stigma around, you know, work is work. It's like no man work can be fun.
Oh, I fully agree with that. So my last question for you is the same one, I asked all my guests, and that is, tell me one, book, video, Ted Taw piece of media, that you would recommend that an instructional designer with a creative background could use to bolster their career.
I'm going to refer to it earlier. His name is Matt sustaita. He's an instructional designer. And I believe the article is called transition from teaching to elearning. I don't know if this is necessarily good for the general instructional designer. But this is good for anyone who may not already be in instructional design. I guess that's kind of the audience here, isn't it? It just so happens that this one specifically focuses on teaching, but the real message behind it is your skills that
you have are valuable. You know, like that's the thing is that you get locked into this thing as a teacher where you think all you can do for the rest of your life is teach, or all you can do for the rest of your life is maybe move into an administrative position. And that is simply not true. whatever field you're coming from whatever field you're currently in, probably offers
more skills than you think. And if you don't have a lot of skills, like let's say you're transitioning from something really, really mundane, like, let's say you're the guy who follows the elephants at the circus and picks up after them. You've got a couple of things you can put on the resume. But the long and the short of it is is we live in an age where you
can develop yourself. You know, there was there was a point in time I think it was kind of in my adolescence and transitioning into adulthood where you go to college, you get the degree, you do the work and I think The world is kind of growing out of that. And I think it's a pendulum swing to like, sure along for a long time, it's, you know, maybe college and then it swings back and goes, yes, definitely college and then swings back. And we're kind of in an age where we can do this
from anywhere. And we can teach ourselves a lot of things. And I know people who teach themselves how to play guitar on YouTube, you know, like, you can. And that's, that's really, you know, I, I'm, I can tack something onto the end of that if I want to, but I'm not going to the short long and the short of it is you can, and if you really want some proof that you can go look up that status transition from teaching to learning. Because if there's one thing that teaching really does, well,
it's break your soul a bit. And so having that kind of having that kind of go get them Tiger attitude from someone who actually did it really, really pushed me to actually do it.
And it sounds like that article might be good for, you know, instructional designers who are getting a little bit jaded to and like, Oh, why am I doing this to spark their motivation? And maybe even instructional designers who are struggling a little bit with impostor syndrome, too? So it sounds like it could be a good read for any instructional designer?
Oh, yeah, man, it's an imposter syndrome, I don't think will ever go away. You know, like, I don't think I don't think anyone I was recently told in this kind of helped me, kind of keep the lid on the imposter syndrome a bit. Where, you know, I was mixing a song that I recently recorded. And, you know, even though I've been doing it for years, and years and years, I wasn't as happy with it. You know, because I don't have any formal mixing, training, a lot of it's trial
and error. And so I took it to a guy who does this professionally. And I went, I will pay you to mix my song. But most importantly, I want you to sit with me, and mix my songs. So I can watch how you do it. So maybe I can take, take this away and do it myself next time. Sure. And so, you know, we
talked about it. And you know, one of the things that was brought up was like, you know, even if you do it exactly the same way I do, and you find that you end up getting the exact same result, that will kind of quell your imposter syndrome a little bit because it'll reinforce the things that you've already know how to do and the choices that you're already
making. If you end up picking up tips along the way, that's great, you know, new learn thing, it's a win win, you either are reinforced with the choices you already make, or you learn the correct choices to make along the way. But the thing that really resonated with me is that, you know, you do this kind of stuff yourself, because you often end up in situations where you are the person that knows the most in the room, and you know, the figurative room and whatever
sphere of people you're in. And so sometimes that's what makes you the expert is that you just happen to be the guy who knows the most at the time. Does that mean 100%? No, not exactly. Not all the time. But if you're, if you're the person who knows the most, then you're the new 100% for that particular application. And that kind of qualify impostor syndrome a bit. It's like, well, I mean, if there's someone out there who knows more than I do, either a they would
have gotten them. Or B. I can at least look that way if I'm ever lacking. Yeah,
absolutely. Well, thank you, Alex, for taking the time to talk with me today.
Thank you for having me on. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks again
for joining me on the BLOC. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.