SPRING 2015
Ryan Klinger and I had a wonderful year getting to know each other and learn about our different roles as IDs at Penn State. Since Ryan and I do vastly different things at PSU, this became a very rich experience over the course of the year, as I learned more about life as an ID with the World Campus and he about life as a campus ID. We discovered that we have some important things in common, namely lifelong learning and a love of teaching, which were constant themes in our conversations. His work developing the online accounting degree program at WC was fascinating. The teams of people involved in design, development and execution at WC boggles the mind. As a campus ID, we are constrained by our numbers. On my campus, there are 50 full-time and 47 part-time faculty who need my help with any number of things from video projects to ANGEL to ePortfolio development. I’ve been thinking a lot about the campus ID role lately and my talks with Ryan helped to spur my thinking on the topic, which I wrote up here in my campus blog. I think this process – meeting – conversation – reflection – writing is a powerful tool for learning and a strength of this program. Ryan and I both had vastly different kinds of work, but the chance to simply talk about our work with each other and think about what it means to us, led to insights and a reminder of the value of the work we do. It was a privilege and a happy task to have this experience with Ryan. What a wonderful and talented colleague! Thanks to those managing the ID-2-ID Program for making this possible.
Fall 2014 (posted October 31, 2014)
Last year, I participated in the ID-2-ID Buddy program with Wenyi Ho, a senior instructional designer at the World Campus. Together, we shared our different experiences working as learning designers at Penn State. For me, it was very informative to hear the process that happens as designers and faculty get together to plan new programs and courses to go online. I was able to share the SoTL projects we were working on at the time and other challenges unique to the campuses.
This year, Ryan Klinger and I are in an ID-2-ID mentoring relationship which has already been really fun and fruitful! Ryan is relatively new to PSU, starting last summer, and coming from a master’s program at Harvard – go Ryan! He is situated at PSU Harrisburg and is the lead ID in charge of 2 new accounting programs – undergrad and grad- through the World Campus. Again, it has been interesting to see a”behind the curtain” view of this very robust process at WC – from conception to creation of online courses and programs. The amount of support and personnel involved stands in sharp contrast to the reality at the campuses with one (or no) IDs to support all faculty in a multitude of teaching and learning endeavors. But this knowledge helps me to be a stronger advocate for my own faculty – when the talk of creating online courses and programs begins, I am better positioned to set reasonable expectations given the current state of resources and support. It is a constant tension and a catch 22. We need to broaden our online offerings, but we don’t have the support staff to do it and can’t afford to hire more. The online courses would generate revenue (hopefully) enough to hire more staff. So in the end, we can’t get the staff we need to create the new programs that will generate revenue until we create the programs that need the staff to create them – lol!!!
Another nice connection to Ryan’s work for me is accounting education. In summer of 2012, a former colleague at PSY , Ed Jenkins, who is now teaching for Smeal College of Business at UP in their accounting program, asked me if I would do a session for PICPA accounting educators at their summer professional development conference at Hershey. It was a great experience and opportunity, and one that I enjoyed very much – getting to learn as much as I could about the struggles of teaching accounting. I am so glad that at some point I decided to keep some online presence for these types of things, because it was neat to revisit it and share some of the resources! http://teachaccountingtech.wordpress.com/ It has been fun to talk with Ryan about accounting education again!
Ryan and I have been taking turns visiting each others campuses, getting tours, and participating in professional development opportunities (like Learning Design Summer Camp and the Bryan Alexander presentation through COIL) that are mutually beneficial. This month, Ryan came to York and participated in a joint Media Commons/ETS presentation by Carla Rapp and Heather Hughes on creating instructional videos and ePortfolios at Penn State. I then traveled to Harrisburg and got a wonderful tour of the new one-button studio and their technology classrooms with SmartBoards.
Ryan and I have another common interest in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) which is something that I’d worked on when I was at Towson (briefly) before coming to Penn State. Ryan currently is presenting the conceptual and applied aspects of UDL at different venues and conferences with his team. His updated knowledge of UDL has been informative and timely with the new focus on accessibility at PSU. I appreciate getting the chance to re-visit the topic.UDL, to me, is the best of both worlds – we make content accessible because it is the law, but we also do it, because it is just best practice – How to make instruction accessible to the greatest range of people, no matter the circumstances. This represents a way of being as a learning designer – so much more than simply doing the work because we have to!
Our plan for the spring is to continue to visit each other monthly (virtually if the weather is bad) and to continue to share any pertinent professional development opportunities that we have available. We both have conferences coming up that will be interesting to share, and I’m sure we’ll both be at the TLT Symposium in late March together. So there have been plenty of opportunities for both of us to benefit from the program.
So far, even though the focus of our individual work is vastly different, I think the relationship has been very rewarding. Ryan is a great guy and a wonderful addition to the PSU Learning Design team. I’ll learn a lot from him as he makes his way through his projects, and I hope to share what I’ve learned over the years about teaching and learning and the role of the instructional designer at one of the Penn State campuses.
