Personal Life
I am Zahra Rasian. I have seven years of experience in teaching and facilitating in Vancouver. I am an employment consultant and college instructor. I have a Bachelor of English Translation and a Master of Linguistics from my home country Iran. I used to be a university lecturer for 10 years. I was doing my Ph.D. in Education when I moved to Canada in 2011. Leaving a few years of research and challenging exams behind to choose immigration was a tough decision and I am happy with my decision now. At the time, I requested the faculty to make an exception and let me continue my program as a distance educator, but it was not accepted. At that time the program used to be offered only in physical classrooms, so I did not get the chance to complete it. I truly felt the need for a change in the education system to accommodate learning for everyone despite time and place. Covid indeed accelerated the expansion of distance learning concept in the world. Currently, most educational institutes offer both in-person and virtual classes, this bonus has opened up the doors of hopes for everyone who wants to educate and upgrade their skills.
I live in North Vancouver with my family. I have a 21-year-old daughter who is a full-time student. I want to be a role model for her as a lifelong learner who values learning at any age.
Motivation Factors
I joined WorkBC in 2015 as a facilitator and supported the team in various roles as a job developer, resource room advisor, and admin. My role was mainly designing and facilitating the employment workshops and presenting the WorkBC services in the community events. I got a part-time job as a college instructor in 2018 to teach Workplace Preparation to international students. I support the co-op students with job search and job maintenance.
Serving as a facilitator at WorkBC, I always asked myself how I can make the workshops more interactive for the audience. I learned about instructional design programs, I contacted some experts via LinkedIn and learned about the Instructional Design program at Athabasca. I started my master’s in distance education in 2019 and ever since applied my learning outcomes towards improving my working and teaching strategies as well as creating online tools to smooth learning for participants. I created an online course on Canvas to introduce BC Employment Standards to educate my clients and students. I also switched to the case manager role in 2020 to experience different duties within the organization. I have been teaching most of my career life and I hope to improve my skills in teaching and learning.
My Courses
Master of Education in Distance Education - Winter 2019 – Fall 2022.
My Five Artifacts
The five artifacts I chose are those that helped me to find the missing pieces of my teaching strategy puzzle. Being grown up with the conventional method of learning, applying the traditional approach to teaching, and immigrating to Canada enlightened the need to enrich my teaching mastery. As I reviewed my collection of learning experiences during the last four years, I ultimately decided to choose those which gave me the aha moment and I felt happy inside myself for learning the information. These courses were fillers of my knowledge gaps for the following reasons.
- I learned the standard method of writing a curriculum for a course and I applied the knowledge in designing my workshops and college course.
- I felt that learning the principles of distance education has helped me to redesign my course suitable from an in-person learning environment to a virtual setting after Covid.
- I improved my teaching and facilitating strategies as a result of learning student support services at distance education and training.
List of Artifacts
Zahra Rasian - MDDE - Sub- Competencies List
Zahra, 2022
My Daughter, Yasmin
Zahra, Tehran, 2021
My Learning Goals
- Create interactive learning courses for corporate organizations as an instructional designer
- Understand and use new technologies for teaching and presentation purposes
- Address the barriers of job seeker clients and students by offering job search workshops in the virtual environment to make it accessible for everyone
- Select and recommend appropriate learning tools to learners
Butchart Gardens, Victoria, BC
Capstone e-portfolio layout
This capstone e-portfolio is a reflection of my learning journey in my master’s program in distance education, major instructional design from 2019 – 2022. My e-portfolio is designed in seven pages including an introduction, five artefacts, and a conclusion at the end.
The goal of the e-portfolio is to reflect the core skills, competencies, and knowledge that were drawn from the learning outcomes of the master’s program.
The first page is an introduction to my personal and working life, plus the courses I took and my motivators to move on. Page two to six demonstrates five artefacts as a reflection of my learning outcomes and page seven will talk about the takeaways of my learning journey and reflecting on the learning goals I have achieved.
Through the reflective process, I demonstrated my assignments which helped me to fill out the knowledge gaps I had and the sub-competencies I gained to better serve clients and students in my job.
The list of core-competencies alongside sub-competencies are illustrated on the attached table. The sub-competencies achieved during my MDDE program are shown with a check mark.