Rachel Mentink-Ferraro is an IDOL Academy student, and she's putting her instructional design skills to work in a unique way - by creating a course for first-time homebuyers. Rachel comes from an education background, having taught 8th grade history for several years. She loved the creativity and storytelling involved in designing engaging lessons for her students. When she left the classroom, she explored the edtech world, but found the work to be sporadic. That's when she discovered the IDOL Academy and its focus on building practical skills in instructional design.

"I realized that I love curriculum and instruction - both sides of learning experiences," Rachel explains. "I use the creative side and the analytical side of my brain. And I realized it really didn't matter what I was designing, as long as I was designing something beautiful."

For her IDOL Academy project, Rachel is working with a real estate agent client to create a first-time homebuyer course. The goal is to help ease the nerves and uncertainty that often come with purchasing a first home.

"First time homebuyers went from 36% of the market down to 24% last year," Rachel notes. "So looking at why that drop is - some of it is just nerves. And how do you create something to make the prospective first-time homebuyer feel at ease, feel that they're not alone?"

Rachel's approach is to make the course highly scenario-based, putting the learner in the shoes of different characters navigating the home buying process. This allows her to address common pain points, like creating a budget, in an engaging and relatable way.

"I'm taking the scenario that I built for my storyboarding, and I'm going to rapid prototype that and carry it through," Rachel says. "Even looking at my storyboard now, there's parts of it that I want to get change of course. And you know, we're talking about doing it messy here."

The "do it messy" mindset is a core part of the IDOL Academy philosophy, which encourages students to embrace feedback and iteration. As an artist by training, Rachel is no stranger to this process.

"I have a degree in Fine Arts. That was my first bachelor was art education. So I taught art for quite a few years before I transitioned into history. And so art courses and your studio classes are all very feedback based - you create something, you have a critique, and so you can all I learned at a very young age, even in high school, when I was taking my art courses and we had critiques that you need that feedback to make you better."

With her background in education and design, coupled with the skills she's honing at the IDOL Academy, Rachel is poised to create an impactful learning experience that will give first-time homebuyers the confidence they need to take that big step.

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