Biography

Julia Bulkowski has been an educator in diverse situations for the last five years. She has taught groups of sixth grade students at an outdoor education school, during which she developed new curriculum for a stream-studies course. She then transitioned to teaching sixth grade in the classroom. Following her classroom teaching experience, she was hired as an education specialist in the life sciences division of NASA. In this role Julia developed workshops focusing on the effects of microgravity on the body and presented them to teams of teachers as well as middle school students. She evaluated, revised, and created new learning modules for the Virtual Astronaut Learning Environment website and participated in filming two distance education programs, NASA Connect’s “Good Stress: Building Better Muscles and Bones” and “The Right Ratio of Rest.” She successfully wrote a proposal for a new outreach project, a “Flies in Space” website, to teach middle school students about a fruit fly experiment that will be launched on the space shuttle. Since the proposal was accepted, she has managed the project by interviewing subject matter experts, creating the educational content, and working closely with the site’s developers.

Most recently, she has begun applying instructional design principles in an astronaut training position at NASA. The position involves reviewing hardware to fly on the International Space Station, developing training objectives, and creating lesson plans to educate the astronauts on the use of hardware for life science experiments conducted in space.
The increasing popularity of computer-based training programs has led to widespread use within businesses and organizations. It is critical that these training programs meet the needs of all learners. Integrating the theory of multiple intelligences into e-learning programs can greatly enhance the users’ experience with the computer programs. Designers of e-learning programs must take into account many factors as they apply effective systematic instructional design practices.

Through her teaching experience, Julia has discovered that everyone learns best under different circumstances. Computer-based training seeks to instruct a diverse group of people efficiently by providing the same content to everyone. Computers offer a range of opportunities to meet different learners’ needs; training programs need to take advantage of the educational theories about learning styles and multiple intelligences. Astronaut training increasingly takes place on the computer. When creating training materials, Julia strives to integrate as many effective educational and cognitive theories as possible.