{"id":5135,"date":"2025-03-03T13:27:30","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T13:27:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=5135"},"modified":"2025-03-03T13:27:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T13:27:30","slug":"an-introduction-to-the-design-of-education-my-experience-as-a-design-curriculum-intern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/an-introduction-to-the-design-of-education-my-experience-as-a-design-curriculum-intern\/","title":{"rendered":"An introduction to the design of education: My experience as a design curriculum intern"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between November 2023 and May 2024, I had the opportunity to take on the role of Curriculum Design Intern. <\/span>My responsibilities were primarily focused on providing feedback on educational\u202fcontent developed for future Design modules at the OU. \u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I applied to the internship after seeing the Design team\u2019s wish to engage with diverse students. As a non-binary and neurodivergent individual, I felt I had a unique perspective to offer. The remote nature of the internship was crucial \u2013 as a disabled individual, I would not have been able to take part otherwise.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Experiences<\/span><\/p>\n

My experiences throughout the internship were varied and primarily helped me develop excellent interpersonal skills and confidence in my skills, abilities and knowledge.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Working amongst co-workers with such impressive accolades was extremely interesting and inspiring, and it has cemented my interest in future higher learning as I advance in my career.<\/span> The team were warm and welcoming. They were always interested in what I brought to the table and validated my learning and personal experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was able to visit the University campus itself and workshop with the team. This fantastic opportunity helped develop my confidence and relationships within the team.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I briefly struggled in a topic\u202freview which involved coding an algorithmic repeating pattern. I have struggled with coding in the past, and have a slight fear of the subject. I found it difficult to talk about my struggles. The topic author and I had a meeting, and we slowly untangled where I had become stuck. Although I was embarrassed to have ended up so lost, I slowly began to realise how critical my\u202fexperience was to the future development of the course. I stepped out of the mind of the student and began to explain my experience. Together, we discussed methods to guide future students on the right track. I hope my\u202fstruggle\u202fhelps future students with a similar neurotype to mine, and that they may find the topic much more accessible following our adjustments.<\/span>\u202f I did manage to complete the task, and one of my patterns is featured in the header image to this post.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Following virtually attending the eSTEeM annual conference and seeing Design Intern alumni discuss their own approach to the module, I was inspired to share my experience and to help lift my community. Following being tasked to assess an accessibility review of the Level 2 proposal, I created a document noting multiple LGBTQIA+ individuals who had created change, both as designers and also changemakers in society. This report was met with warmth, and the wish to further develop the content for further application. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was tasked to co-develop an interactive educational exercise to allow students to develop their understanding of the concept of user journey swim lanes. I felt like I was able to utilise my education and experience productively.\u202fI was able to present this project to the development team and they seemed very excited about the activity. I very much enjoyed this task, and I would have loved to have the opportunity to help develop more interactive elements for the module. It\u2019s very much something I would love to do in future career opportunities.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The wireframe for the interactive exercise, where students can drag and drop answers to populate different swim lanes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Throughout the internship, I took advantage of being able to attend various extremely interesting seminars. I have been able to access such varied topics from teaching students with autism, to evidence of queer zoology\u202fwithin the animal kingdom.<\/span>\u202fThese topics have helped expand my horizons both within and outside of design.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Personal Development<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned a lot about myself. <\/span>I felt a shift in the skills I had developed in my career as a quality assurance games tester, as they became more applied to the internship. My skills began as extremely granular analysis and developed into a much broader approach. I became more confident in offering my educated opinion, shaped by my studies at the OU, my previous career, and my lived experience.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve very much peeked behind the curtain and discovered how University courses are developed & the <\/span>hard work that goes into creating the content. I will utilise the lessons I learned about educational design and pedagogical studies in future projects.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned that structure is extremely important to my functioning within a job. There were times I felt a bit lost when being left to independently carry out tasks. This was remedied slightly by trying to join all meetings where possible to build a structure in my week. I learned very important lessons about the structure I require to be able to complete tasks successfully, and I hope to pursue and implement that structure in future positions.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Critiques<\/span><\/p>\n

The ending of the internship felt very abrupt. I felt like I had finally found my footing and my place in the team, and suddenly, it was time to return my laptop. I hope future design internships are a bit longer, to give future interns a bit more time to contribute to the team and project. <\/span><\/p>\n

Some topics were not always quite ready or available for the interns to review, and with such a tight internship deadline, this meant that some topics were not granted the care or attention they could have benefitted from. <\/span><\/p>\n

A lot of tasks were self-governed, but as a neurodivergent individual, it was not always clear what content was open to be critiqued, or if there were any pitching opportunities to implement new content available.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Final Thoughts<\/span><\/p>\n

Following my first experience in designing education, I feel I learned so much about the art of crafting a course. I entered the course hoping just for some pieces to add to my portfolio, but I learned so much more than that. I gained a multitude of fantastic resources, I developed incredibly useful interpersonal skills, and I gained so much confidence. It was a fantastic experience and I\u2019m extremely grateful to the team for allowing me this opportunity. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I hope to apply what I\u2019ve learned to future career paths I plan to follow, including freelancing as a consultant, designer, and educator.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I would highly recommend a design internship; I feel I was able to legitimise the skills I have learned throughout my OU career and gained a lot of confidence in my abilities. One of the beautiful things about the OU is the breadth of experience that everyone brings to the table, be it from conventual education or the vast variety of lived experiences and interests we have. There is a lot to learn from each other.\u00a0 I advise future interns to really embrace as much of the OU as possible; check out your emails for interesting talks and attend all you can. Don\u2019t be scared to get involved and really take advantage of the knowledge you\u2019ll be surrounded with.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between November 2023 and May 2024, I had the opportunity to take on the role of Curriculum Design Intern. My responsibilities were primarily focused on providing feedback on educational\u202fcontent developed for future Design modules at the OU. \u202f\u00a0 I applied to the internship after seeing the Design team\u2019s wish to engage with diverse students. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":5137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5135"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5730,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5135\/revisions\/5730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}