Next Path Backstory

Austin Kleon’s book “Show Your Work” and his tireless approach to sharing his day-to-day creative process have been a huge inspiration. I’ve even tried to bridge the concepts to the instructional design field in my “Design in the Open” classes over the years. Now, as I launch Next Path Design, it’s time to show my own work by sharing how this new venture came to be.

It’s no secret that the field of education has been going through tumultuous times over the past several years. Politics, economics, AI, a pandemic, and other factors have all intersected to create significant disruptions that are well documented elsewhere. Just as the pandemic shut down the world, we were exploring options for a sustainable path forward at Designers for Learning, the nonprofit I founded back in 2014 to support adult foundational skills education. Its programming has been on a five-year hiatus ever since.

In the meantime, I embarked on new professional paths as a university instructor and consultant working on incredibly rewarding multi-year adult education projects with fantastic teams at Scalelit and World Education.

Fast forward to this year, and funding options for the types of nonprofit service-driven projects I’ve long tried to support have dwindled. So, I’m letting go of any hopes of rekindling the long-parked Designers for Learning nonprofit. This begins the long story short of the “why” behind Next Path Design.

When one door closes, another opens, so I decided to make lemonade out of lemons – and to mix metaphors! As soon as my spring semester ended this year, I got to work trying to figure out where I could best continue to work on grand challenges. Technology integration, adult skills, and the associated literacies have long been my passion. Therefore, it was a fairly logical pivot to focus on AI, the next path for all of us.

As I’ve done since the early days during EdTech Weekly, I dug in and started trying all kinds of AI to figure out what it is, its affordances, challenges, possibilities, implications, and risks. It was a relatively short path from this exploration to deciding that AI is where I wanted to spend my time, helping others on their next path with this emerging technology.

I went to work transitioning to this new professional focus by adding a d/b/a to my existing LLC of Next Path Design and purchasing the nextpathdesign.com domain. Then, I signed up for a 90-day trial of Kajabi to test out its features as my online home for courses and a community space under a subdomain of learn.nextpathdesign.com (coming soon!). The logistics all fell into place in a matter of days.

This left me the summer to decide my first focus and get started designing and developing my first class. As I’ll cover in future posts, I utilized AI to assist with various design tasks, including analyzing different AI literacy frameworks to identify central competencies, examining the most popular YouTube channels to determine the types of AI subjects that generate the most interest, and so on.

While my initial goal was to focus on AI in the workplace, I soon realized there was an even bigger gap in more foundational AI skills and knowledge. This included a focus on the basics of AI Assistants (chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, etc.), covering topics such as the opportunities and threats, potential uses in daily life, comparisons of the top tools, privacy and security considerations, basic prompting, and response evaluation. That’s how the upcoming AI Pathfinder Foundations course was born. More to come on how I designed this course in the coming weeks.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for listening to my story. I’m excited to document this journey as it unfolds, and I hope you’ll join me on this next path.

– Jennifer

Want to follow along as I document this journey?

I’ll be sharing Next Path Notes about building this course, my AI discoveries, and behind-the-scenes insights from launching a new venture.

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