Like most people in Canada, I have gone through a lot of education in my life, from the K-12 system, to now post-secondary. In this education, I have experienced both good and bad learning experiences, and while the bad experiences are often easy to understand why they were bad, I have never given the same consideration for the good experiences. Of course there are some reasons that are obvious such as a good teacher, or an interesting topic, however, if I think back to my good experiences, they all have one thing in common, and that is I was motivated to learn. In this post I want to showcase the best learning experience I can remember, and the reasons that I think I enjoyed it.

A great experience for me was one of the first classes I ever took at university actually. In my first semester I had to take a brand new course in my program on an introduction to programming instead of the normal computer science one. The experience ended up being a great learning experience due to a couple of factors. One factor was the learning design. The course took the design of a constructivist style, where the course was essentially a workshop where each person would work through programming problems, with the teacher supporting areas of difficulty for each student. This overall led to a great learning experience as we were actually able to learn the concepts being taught in a supportive way. Another factor was that the class, or at least I was motivated in this class to put in effort and learn the concepts taught. The programming being taught was specific to healthcare and I thought this was interesting first of all, and the coursework was also something that I thought would be relevant to my future work. This, along with the confidence I felt from the learning design made me motivated to take the course seriously and try and learn as much as I could.

Overall, I think the reason why my experience with this course was good was due to the fact that the course was designed in a way to support learners. I think this gave people confidence in themselves to learn the subject matter and put in effort into the class due to being motivated from the class.