Lachlan McLaren, Dr

Qualifications

Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) (Marketing)
Postgraduate Certificate (Higher Education Learning and Teaching)
Doctor of Philosophy

Professional profile

Lachie is part of the instructional design team at CORE Education.

Before joining CORE in 2015, Lachie worked and studied at Victoria University of Wellington. His work at Victoria included teaching and designing online, blended and face-to-face courses. He also held positions in academic development where he assisted, trained and advised staff about how to use technology effectively in their teaching.

Lachie was heavily involved in a project designed to develop the confidence and capability of Victoria staff to use technology in their teaching.

As well as teaching at Victoria, Lachie completed his PhD there in 2014. His research used interactivity and information processing theories to investigate how people process the information in interactive online advertisements. In 2015, Lachie completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Learning and Teaching to complement his years of teaching experience.

The combination of interactivity-based research, teaching online and studying marketing has given Lachie a customer focus and a keen interest in how interactivity throughout technology affects the learning experience.

Expertise

• Interactivity/interaction online.
• Designing online courses.
• Using Learning Management Systems effectively (Moodle, Blackboard).
• Teaching with technology.
• Skills mapping and staff capability development.
• Lachie brings a wealth of experience in designing and teaching online courses for adult learners. His background is tertiary education where he worked in a distance education team before entering the world of professional development as a lecturer in e-learning.
• Lachie also brings a sound theoretical understanding of effective course design and adult learning and enthusiastically brings this theory to life to design effective and engaging online courses.
• His research background has equipped him with a sharp analytical mind, an eye for detail and the ability to collaborate with many people to achieve goals.
• Working with a variety of subject matter experts (within CORE and externally) with diverse course building approaches to meet deadlines and produce quality courses.
• Quickly forming good relationships with clients that allow open sharing of ideas developed over years of teaching and working in academic development.
• PhD research used interactivity and information processing theories which Lachie now applies to learning to help design engaging courses.
• Lachie brings a range of perspectives to online course design having taught online, studied online and currently designing online courses.
• Postgraduate Cert HELT equipped Lachie with established theories and frameworks for higher education course design. These, combined with the Learning Design team's vast skills and experience, provide a successful recipe for creating engaging courses focused on what the learner does.

Personal statement

The first time one of my students took a photo of the whiteboard board with an iPad, I knew technology was going to bring new challenges and opportunities into learning and teaching situations. I enjoy being in this quickly changing environment, and helping to figure it out. I work from the sunny Bay of Plenty in a highly-skilled (virtual) team. I’m always happy to talk about ideas and help turn them into useful projects.