Shawn Baglin

Shawn Baglin is a professional instructional designer at Dolby Laboratories.  As a specialist in training, development and management, she merges the fields of education, business, and technology.

Shawn Baglin is an instructional designer at the global audio technology company,  Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco, CA.  As a manager of technology enablement at this innovative company, Shawn is involved in instructional design, curriculum development, and the management of the new employee onboarding program. She also has the opportunity to consult with the business in regards to learning platforms and systems.

The Road From Korea

After working for seven or eight years in various technology corporations and teaching English in Korea, Shawn decided to earn her master’s degree. Shawn attended the University of Michigan-Flint Educational Technology Global Program from 2006 to 2008. The program allowed her to increase her skills in instructional design and to become a better educator. She wanted to gain more knowledge about the use of technology in the field of education.

Gaming for Global Issues

During her Master’s program, Shawn and a partner developed a site called DevInfo Gameworks (DIGW).  This software gaming site utilizes information from DevInfo.info, which was created by the United Nations to develop the Millennium Development Goals.  Shawn’s site allows visitors to log in to create games based on development data from around the world.  The idea was to encourage visitors to use the site in a social way similar to YouTube or other digital games, but with the goal of educating young people about global issues.

Design for Learning Anytime, Anywhere

As an instructional designer, Shawn designs the way users learn. The instructional designer is tasked with providing training or learning that a company wants to capture to deploy to lots of people. Instructor-led or live classes are the most desirable option for training. Unfortunately, the entire audience is often unable to attend the learning at the same time. Therefore, that learning must be captured so that it can be used at anytime, anywhere. Generally, it is necessary to capture subject matter experts speaking, along with some other static materials for the user to read or use afterwards. Ideally, there would be more time and money spent designing, but normally that is not possible.

The instructional designer needs to know some essential questions to effectively design learning: “What is your purpose?” “What do you want the learner to do afterwards?”

Shawn has a large amount of experience working with learning management systems. Working in Human Resources, on a learning and development team, she has had to do some administration around learning programs. After obtaining her Master’s degree, she used that degree and her experience with learning management systems to obtain a challenging position. She has now worked with them for over eight years and has done everything from simply using them, to implementing them from the ground up.

Try and Make It Better

Shawn encourages those in educational technology to keep experimenting, researching, and iterating.   She advises, “Continue to improve and try and make it better. Try out any software you can and really push the software to its limits. And don’t be afraid to go low tech if the situation calls for it.” To continue her own learning, Shawn belongs to the ELearningGuild.com and tries to spend 30 minutes each week reading and learning. She also attends all the conferences and webinars she can to keep up with what is happening in her industry.