a digital portfolio
I've been involved in the creation of learning technology inside the university and outside the university. I've led a Faculty-level learning tech and IT team in the creation of new tools and the marketing and support for new and existing tools. I've started two edtech companies and done application development, UI/UX design, legal, marketing, sales, user onboarding, and user support.
What have I learned? Don't be naive. Be realistic.
I teach a course with students in a small group through the whole term, building public facing websites. I give lots of feedback along the way, essentially coaching more than teaching.
In 2020 I tried using Notion for the whole process: all of the scaffolded group work, my coaching, and then the public-facing website. It was a huge success. This is the story.
For years I was frustrated with how we track grad students' progress and supervise them. PhD committees don't share notes, department information is inaccessible to supervisors, students are stressed that their committee doesn't know what they're working on and what stage they're at. So I solved this problem with a web application built on no-code platform Bubble. It's live at Prograds.com and we're bringing our first customers on board.
As Director of Arts ISIT I led a project to build an ePortfolio tool from scratch on the Wordpress platform. Collaborating with Jason Myers, Michael Ha, Letitia Henville, Heidi May, Ricardo Serrano, Angela Lam, Leanna Chow, and Julie Walchli, we did it.
I am leading an effort to collect information on the learning experience, learning activities, and output of students in all UBC Political Science courses. We then aggregate that information by student to produce what we call a "Rich Transcript" showing what each student did in the course in their Political Science major. Feedback from students has been very positive.
I've been teaching Political Science courses at UBC since 2001. Graduate and undergraduate. I've taught the required quantitative methods course at both levels. Colleagues and I redesigned POLI380 to be a so-called 'flipped class' in 2012. Students have a lukewarm reaction to the material and the course design. I've also taught in my research specialties: elections & public opinion. But...
I have now rejected the 'standard' way of designing and teaching a university class.
In 2013 the Dean of Arts asked me to lead the Arts ISIT unit. I was always a geek and into learning technology. But the position really opened my eyes to all the challenges of management: helping a team of 25 people work together on a wide range of projects and services to help Arts faculty, staff, and students use technology for teaching and learning, research, and administration. In 2017-18 I served in a Staff position as Director of ISIT while also working as CEO of WeVu.
With two UBC colleagues from Arts ISIT, I co-founded ISIT Technology, which provides WeVu.video. It's a different video platform for education that emphasizes student self-recording of skills practice and instructors watching and giving feedback. It's been a crazy ride.