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Monserrat Jimenez

Professor McCall

Content Production Leadership

30 April 2018

Learning Analysis Paper

This paper is intended to reflect on my assignments in my Content Production Leadership

course. This course focused on examining leadership through different assignments in which

were asked to create content for the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC. In this

course we created two blogs, and podcast. I will explain my experiences with each assignment,

the strategic choices made, recognition of strengths, and recognition of areas that need

improvement. I will conclude this paper with culminating thoughts of the three assignments in

this course.

In the first assignment my partner and I created a blog in regards to women in leadership

in the academia setting. We had to be strategic about this in the beginning because we needed to

focus on a specific topic. That saved us a lot of time, so we could focus on the person we would

interview and the type of questions we would ask. For this assignment we decided to interview

Dr. Simon who is a Communication Studies Professor here at UNCG. Getting the interview set

up was challenging since my partner and I had to work around our schedules. In addition, we

had to keep our interviewee’s schedule in mind as well. Our first interview was cancelled due to

scheduling issues. The interviewee itself was enjoyable. We had the opportunity to hear through

our professor’s voice what leadership means to her in the academia context. We, also, learned

some amazing facts about our professor which we would not have known if we did not conduct

this interview.
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We were interested in this topic because my partner and I felt there was lack of women in

leadership the higher you go up in positions in the education level. Statistics show that 76 % of

public teachers were female (National Center for Education Statistics). Another statistic shows

that “the higher up the academic ladder, the wilder the gender gap” (Women in Academia 2017).

We wanted to explore why these statistics did not translate in other positions especially in more

authoritative positions such as in administration. This was, also, important to us because we as

women do not want our gender prevent us from moving up in the world. Also, it is shown that

“women are less likely than men to achieve tenure” (Women in Academia 2017).

It was important to split the work evenly between my partner and I. With this we each

had to look at our strengths, so we could meet the deadline for submission. My strengths

allowed me to execute some of things needed in order to complete the assignment such as setting

up the interview, emailing Dr. Simon, following up with Dr. Simon, creating the interview

questions, setting up the information on the submission form, and submitting the assignment.

These were more technical aspects of the content production of the assignment. I do realize

some of the areas I can definitely improve on is the revision aspect. This was hard for me

because I needed to concentrate on re-reading the information I had already presented, take

feedback into consideration, and looking at ways to rephrase certain information. I will

definitely keep improving on these areas by rereading the work I put into assignments, getting

people to look at my information, and not setting for a first draft.

Our second blog post was on leadership and technology through the millennials

perspective. Again, one of the best strategic choices Chanel and I made was setting on a topic.

For this assignment we had to be even quicker on the topic since it would involve a lot of

research. I believe Chanel and I were very assertive when it came time to set on a topic. We
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realize how it important it is on picking a topic as quickly as we can, so we can put in our time in

other areas of the assignment. Another strategic choice that was made was the layout of the post.

We focus on what the main topics of our blog would be and then created the content based on the

main topics we had chosen.

We had to engage in research in order to see the importance of how millennials make a

difference in consumer spending. This would be relevant to employers because they need to

know what areas they need to target on consumers and put an emphasis on technology. This was

heavily looked at in “The Social Generations: Millenials Ask, Gen X Buys & Baby Boomers

Observe” (2017). They put an emphasis in looking at the audience’s demographics. One of the

facts they state is that 60% of Baby Boomers look for a promotion on social media (2017). This

is important because companies need to have a presence on social media and this is changing the

consumer world. Social media and technology is playing an importance on consumer habits and

companies must be able to capitalize on this.

My strength in this assignment was always on the deadline. My partner and I would

always touch base to see what stages we were on. We would set mini deadlines in order have

some of the parts completed by a certain date. This way we knew we were on track for the real

deadline. One of the areas where I know I can work on is in the area of research. Research

involves a lot of time and precision to detail. I will work on this my coming in with a positive

attitude when I get ready to research. In addition, I will pay attention to the details of the article

and see if it is relevant to my area of topic.

The last assignment was my favorite assignment and one of the most enjoyable

assignments which was the podcast. With this podcast scheduling definitely played a big role

since we were composed of 4 members and we all had different schedules. Setting up the
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meeting with DACTS and setting up a slot with the podcast equipment was equally hard;

however, we did manage to accomplish both. Doing the actual podcast provided a personal

meaning to the work we were doing because it was relevant to all of us. This area was where my

strength came into play since I enjoyed talking about something relevant to me in the workplace.

Our topic revolved around women in the work place and code-switching. One of the strategic

choices we made was that we would all tell personal stories and keep it relevant to the podcast.

One of the statistics we found was that “men outearn women at all faculty levels” (Women in

Academia 2017). We heavily talked about the women perspective on podcast since it was

relevant to all of us because we notice the difference in behavior when dealing with gender in

leadership. Also, we all had to look up sources to back our information up. Another statistic we

talked about is how “women of color are underrepresented in academia” (Women in Academia

2017). We all had different culture backgrounds that related to this area.

One of the greatest challenges for this assignment was cleaning the podcast. I was

mainly in charge of this area and it was difficult. I believe it was difficult since this was the first

time I was dealing with the Audacity program. Nevertheless, it was a rewarding experience to be

on the producer side of the stage. I would definitely work on improving my skills be getting

familiar with new programs in the future by exploring tutorials and videos online.

In conclusion, these three main assignments gave me the opportunity to work on how I

produced content. I was working on the producer side and it was a different learning experience.

Also, it gave me the opportunity to work with others. This allowed me to see different

perspectives of how others see the same assignment. This course was structured in a different

format which was rewarding and challenging at the same time. It was rewarding because it

allowed me to work on my technical skills while implementing it on my own work. Also, the
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course gave the student a lot of freedom. The student was allowed to pick their own partner, to

choose their own topic, and choose about how the assignment would be completed. It was

challenging at the same time because of our level of experience with some unfamiliar programs.

I personally did not have prior experience with Lynda or Audacity. This, however, allowed me

to learn new resources. Also, it would have been nice to have video tutorials for some of the

assignments we completed. In the end this course incorporated different aspects of other CST

courses, so that we could produce real work to an organization that central for leadership.
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References

The NCES Fast Facts Tool provides quick answers to many education questions (National

Center for Education Statistics). (n.d.). Retrieved from

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28.

The Q1 2017 Sprout Social Index. (2017). “The social generations: millenials ask, gen X buys &

baby boomers observe”. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/q1-2017/.

Women in Academia. (2017, October 20). Retrieved from

from http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-academia#footnote28_ihmcddk.