Employment Interview Q&A
How would you describe your style working with faculty and content development teams?
I am very attentive and I listen well to what my faculty want and what my SME's, designers and developers need. I have an agile working style. I have the ability to set very clear objectives by extracting key points in conversations and, outlining tasks and deadlines that meet those objectives. I see myself as the liaison between these two groups and my job is to help them communicate efficiently and to support the people involved by eliminating barriers to progress. I have a history of working to earn the respect of the people who work for me and with me as a result of my willingness to support them as a group and as individuals. I have a reputation for being fair even through times when the conversations might be difficult.
As a Design Director on many projects, I have extensive experience in working with creative talent and as a creative person myself, I approach these relationships by treating them how I would prefer to be treated. I have defined my approach to leading design teams based on an interview of a prominent creative director that I had heard early in my career. She said that you can take a group of the most talented people you can find and put them in a negative environment – and they will produce nothing of quality. I believe that whole heartedly and it remains a baseline for me 20 years later.
Tell me about your recent instructional design and writing assignments. What project(s) are you most proud of? What project(s) were the most challenging?
One of my more recent instructional design projects was working with Suk Massey, lecturer in East Asian Languages & Literature, to organize the online components of her J-term Korean I Intensive Study Moodle courses. Suk wanted to host five 2-hour live lectures online that could be recorded and posted so students who could not attend could still review the lectures. We posted the link to her Zoom Personal ID room at the top of each course so students could log into the Moodle course and join the live lecture. This worked out well because all of the content that Suk was discussing was in Moodle so students could follow along and Suk could easily access any of the content she wanted to share during her live lectures. This content included one of the 4 e-books that Suk self-published using Pressbooks. (an earlier project I advised her on)
In addition to using Zoom in an online forum, Suk Massey also used Zoom in her on-ground 300 level Korean course to allow students to attend class from two other 5-College campuses. Suk really wanted the remote students to feel connected to the classroom experience so we worked out a solution to allow her to put students who were remote and those in class in Zoom breakout rooms together so they could practice speaking in Korean. Suk could then join each breakout room to facilitate. As students were in these small groups, one student typed notes in Korean using the screenshare and whiteboard tools and then, when Suk brought the students back to the main room, each group was able to share their notes with the class.
As a result of our work together, Suk Massey was named a Sherrerd Prize winner for teaching excellence. These are given to 3 recipients a year to faculty members whose teaching, in the words of one student nominator, “reminds students of their worth and talent.” She has also received continued grant funding and is in the process of being promoted to Senior Lecturer.
In terms of writing, I am process of writing a white paper that highlights and discusses the merits of strategic online teaching. This covers use cases with web conferencing, virtual reality and immersive gaming, social media, and digital projects.
One of the more challenging projects that I have done for Smith is a MOOC called the Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World by SmithX on edX. My role entailed designing interactive content, building the course on the edX platform, managing course communication and discussion board activity, promoting student engagement, promoting and producing live streams to YouTube, and managing social media. One of my key objectives for designing this course was to implement open source tools wherever possible. With this in mind, Smith students created timelines of each of the 9 activists featured in the course using TimelineJS, an open source tool developed by Knight Lab at Northwestern University. I combined quizzes with these and asked students to research the answers within the attached timelines. I implemented an introduction using ZeeMap that allowed our MOOC students to post a pin on their location in the world to introduce themselves. And, I produced Live Meeting Q&A sessions that Professor Duncan hosted in a discussion-based format with her two TA's, Maya and Kavita. The final Q&A session included renowned activst, Gloria Steinem. And, our promotional efforts were done primarily through social media using Facebook and Twitter.
One of the unique blended learning aspects of this project is that the Smith seminar students enrolled Lauren Duncan's on-ground course did the research and developed the timelines as part of their course curriculum. They were assigned the task of creating content for the MOOC version of the course and facilitating the discussion boards which pedagogically provided a great opportunity to teach peers what they were learning. More about this and the students highlighted in the course can be read in the About the Course Team.
Link to the article I wrote on the concepts behind the user experience design for this MOOC
MOOC User Experience Design: Reflecting Smith College in a Global Online Course