About You & Your Role
Can you introduce yourself and describe your role at Six Red Marbles?
I am a Lead Instructional Designer working with several higher education clients to develop new online course offerings or convert existing courses to an online format. I typically manage a team of instructional designers who work closely with individual faculty to develop their courses. As a lead, I’m responsible for juggling the many components of these projects, from working with the client to develop consistent program standards to assisting our instructional design team with faculty issues to tracking the progress of individual courses.
Higher ed projects are always fascinatingly complex because our client is the institution itself, but we work closely with individual faculty members, whose teaching strategies are not always perfectly aligned with institutional goals or instructional design best practices. Much of my role is playing mediator, translating the institution’s requirements and our instructional design standards to the faculty while making sure there is room for faculty to make their courses their own. Before coming to SRM I was a higher ed faculty member myself, so I am sensitive to faculty needs and concerns.
What excites you most about working here?
Leading large projects means that I am often reacting to questions, solving problems, troubleshooting technical glitches, and smoothing out misunderstandings. There are many days when my to-do list gets hijacked by a flurry of emails requiring immediate attention. I have to wear my problem-solving hat every day, which can be invigorating.
Industry Insights & Trends
What is one major shift you’ve noticed in education, content, or instructional design recently?
During the pandemic lockdowns, many faculty members (myself included) pivoted to online teaching by just taking what we did in the classroom and throwing it into an LMS. In that crisis moment, we did what we had to, which was often less than optimal. In order to be truly effective, though, online teaching needs to be approached differently from classroom teaching. This means that teaching in general has become more complex. Institutions are beginning to understand this, but many individual faculty don’t appreciate the differences when they set out to develop their first online course. One of my roles as an instructional designer is often to educate the educators, guiding faculty toward an understanding of how to approach online asynchronous vs. online synchronous vs. synchronous classroom instruction.
Six Red Marbles’ Impact
Can you share a project you’ve worked on at SRM that you feel made a significant impact?
Many of my clients have been public health programs. While my own academic training is in medieval history, I have a great deal of respect for public health as a field. As we have learned throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (and as I also know as a medieval historian studying the period around the Black Death), effective communication of accurate health information is essential for all of our communities to thrive. I love being able to contribute to our clients’ public health mission, which I care deeply about, by helping them develop online programs that can provide public health training to a larger and more diverse pool of students.
How does SRM’s approach stand out in the industry?
SRM designs custom courses that meet the needs and wants of our clients and their faculty. These are not off-the-shelf options. All of our clients are unique, and their faculty have individual priorities and teaching styles. This requires us to be very flexible in our approach as we work to figure out what makes a good course for THIS client.
What’s a fun or unexpected fact about you?
I was a competitive swimmer in college, at Georgetown (go H2oyas!), and I’ve completed over twenty triathlons, including two Ironman 70.3 races.