Category: Blog

Digital Tools for Academic Success

Natalie Berkman

Over the past few years, I’ve been mentoring current Princeton graduate students through the GradFUTURES Mentor Collective. While all my mentees have various career aspirations — both in and out of the academy — one thing has been recurrent. All seek guidance on how to complete the most crucial task of graduate school: the dissertation. While I have a forthcoming article about this due to be published in PMLA, I figured it might be worthwhile to resume my blog posts with a bit of advice about some digital tools and the accompanying strategies that helped me complete my own dissertation. While I wouldn’t say it was perfect (I did a lot of revisions when it came time to publish it as a monograph), it did allow me to win the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition, as well as get two postdoc offers and invitations to two campus visits for tenure-track positions. While I ultimately did not stay in academia, many of these tools have helped me in my non-academic work as well, so I hope they will be useful to more than just my mentees.

Zotero

This is an obvious one, of course. Everyone nowadays seems to be aware that citation softwares such as Zotero (but this is by far not the only one available) are time savers. That said, I’ve noticed that many do not use them. In my case, I started using it later than I should have, once I had a complete draft of the dissertation. When I realized what I was missing by not using a citation software, I meticulously reread the draft and input each source manually (or using the browser connector if possible). While this tool might have better served me earlier in the process, I found that rereading the draft I had with citations in mind was actually a useful exercise. This allowed me not only to streamline my citation process, but also to evaluate how I was using citations in the work and if each reference was really pulling its weight. Furthermore, when the time came to revise the dissertation into a book and my publisher required a different citation style (Harvard rather than MLA), changing this was as easy as a click of a few buttons!

Scrivener

I’m lucky that my friend and former colleague suggested Scrivener early on in my writing process. While I had been used to drafting everything in Microsoft Word, Scrivener allowed me to focus on the essential — outlining and getting words down. How? Well, first off, it was a fantastic tool for outlining. By organizing my work in its online binder, I was able to determine as many subsections that would allow me to make my arguments across my five chapters, while also uploading and classifying my digital sources. Scrivener’s split screen option then allowed me to draft each of these micro units with my sources right there, all in one window. This was groundbreaking for my process! For each section, I would first give myself a target number of words, then go from there. With no need for formatting and no pressure of perfecting citations and footnotes (I could include them, but didn’t need to divert from my main tasks to reformat everything — Microsoft is so bad with formatting in my opinion!), my mind was freed up to focus on what I was actually saying. When I reached my target number of words and was happy with the draft, I could easily export it and then assemble entire chapters in a Word document to send to my advisor. While once I had the Word documents, I abandoned Scrivener, I suspect there might also have been a way to continue using this tool for the rest of the process. Indeed, now that I am working on my second academic project, I intend to use Scrivener the whole way through!

Pomotodo

You might have heard of the pomodoro technique, a tool that does not need to be digital but does allow you to ensure you don’t get too engrossed in your work to take a short break and stretch your legs. For me, this was a big problem and when I learned about this technique, I immediately looked for an app that would allow me to put it into practice. I found Pomotodo. This (mobile or desktop) app combines the power of a to-do list with the pomodoro technique, allowing you to log 25 minute work sessions on any item in your list, then suggesting (but not forcing you to take) a 5 minute break. The app allows you to record very granular details about what you did in the work session, and I found that including multiple smaller, but specific subtasks for each larger objective I had (for instance, not just dissertation chapters, but also subparts) allowed me to ensure that I made the most of each 25 minute interval. Once you have logged a sufficient amount of work, the analytics available on the app can also provide insight into your work process. I, for instance, learned that I was most productive on writing tasks in the morning and that I would spend the whole day on lesson planning if I let myself, even when all that time wasn’t really necessary. The data visualizations helped me realize how I could make myself work more efficiently. While I no longer use this tool, it was very useful when I was juggling teaching, research, and the job market and the more I used it, the less I needed it.

Trello

While I started using Trello as a collaborative tool for the Oulipo Archival Project, I quickly realized that it was the ideal free tool for me to keep track of all my varied projects and deadlines. When I learned many years after completing my dissertation about the Google Drive integration, I realized just how much more powerful this tool could be, especially for my work at SAE Institute or Crimson Education where we work entirely in the Drive. I use Trello as an interactive to-do list, with the lists being categories of work (I have “academia,” “consulting,” and “personal” at the moment, but I believe at the time I had “dissertation,” “teaching,” “job market,” “articles,” and “conferences”), with each card on the list being one project, and with each card containing relevant notes, links, and to-do lists. This is a tool I still use today in all aspects of my life, whether collaborative or not. For instance, my husband and I have a shopping list Trello, and I even have one for my baby!!

These are just a few of the tools I remember using to improve my dissertation work, but this list is clearly not exhaustive. What tools did you use to streamline your research, teaching, or even your work beyond the academy? Leave a comment below! I’d love to learn more!

Advance HE Senior Fellowship

Natalie Berkman

Just a quick post to say that I am thrilled to have achieved the status of Senior Fellow (SFHEA) with Advance HE! This award was a long time coming, through a rigorous application process in which I was greatly assisted by Navitas. Indeed, the particularities of the British higher education system are still something I am getting used to myself, so it was particularly helpful to have the guidance of Navitas professionals as well as personalized feedback from other Advance HE fellows on my various application drafts.

Active Learning in the Online Classroom

Natalie Berkman

With the arrival of the pandemic, my day job as the Academic Manager at SAE Institute Paris has essentially transformed into one of my part-time jobs, online teaching. While I’ve already posted about the administrative side of this shift a few weeks ago (feel free to read it here), I figured that another post about actual pedagogical strategies might be helpful to all the other teachers out there who might have to stay online in the fall and would like to prepare new types of classes that are designed specifically for the online classroom. Since I’m most familiar with Zoom, I will structure this post as a series of lists, each one corresponding to one of Zoom’s many functionalities. While not by any means exhaustive, I hope these tips and tricks that have been very useful in my online classroom will help others!

Share Screen

Just like in a traditional classroom, it is often helpful to mix it up. With Zoom, you can share your traditional PowerPoint, for sure, but you can also share videos (be sure to click “share computer sound” first!), websites, different software, and more. In certain types of classrooms, sharing something particularly interactive (even if you didn’t have to prepare it in advance) can be far more beneficial for the students. Indeed, unlike a traditional classroom (unless you’re in a computer lab or allow your students to bring their computers), in the Zoom classroom, students can have the software or website open themselves and practice themselves. For instance, in my work with ViaX, I teach students text encoding in XML-TEI using the software Oxygen. Opening Oxygen in the class and having students help me (either orally or in the chat) tag a document is much better than showing them what encoding looks like on a PowerPoint slide or having them try to do it without the appropriate tools. At SAE, teachers have been incorporating a wide range of software and media into their online classrooms, which has been essential to continuing the students’ creative media education.

Annotations

Let’s say you don’t have any interactive software or websites that you could do with your students based on your specific subject matter. For instance, I’ve been teaching academic writing to video games students at SAE for the past few months, and Microsoft Word isn’t a particularly exciting or interesting software to use in class. In this case, a traditional PowerPoint can absolutely be the backbone of your course, just as you would use one in a traditional classroom. That said, to encourage students to participate more, there are certain ways that you can design your PowerPoint to make use of other Zoom features, specifically the annotations. For instance, the other day, I was teaching one of my ViaX students how to perform a close reading on an excerpt I had chosen. While we could have just had a discussion about the text, this task was greatly facilitated by Zoom’s annotations feature. I was able to have her highlight repeated words and sounds, underline sentences that she found particularly meaningful, and even place stars, checks, and more directly onto the slides to keep track of our observations. While these annotations aren’t saved on the PowerPoint slides themselves, you can save the finished product to send to your student(s) and/or post in your LMS as an additional course document, and if the class has been recorded, students can rewatch the line of reasoning that went into those annotations.

Chat

The chat serves a very obvious purpose: students who are more reluctant to speak in class (or perhaps who don’t have a microphone) can post their questions, comments, or concerns in the chat. If there are more than 10-15 students, I would highly encourage using the chat during more lecture-oriented parts of your class to avoid being derailed by endless questions. You can even make it so students cannot unmute themselves, reserving actual conversations for moments you predefined. If the class is recorded, you will have a copy of the chat transcript, but if you want to encourage students to view this textual conversation as a more important aspect of class, I would also encourage you to put the link to a Google Doc in the chat, where students can take notes collaboratively, beyond just asking questions. This sort of strategy works better if you have a second screen, so you can keep track of what students are finding most useful during your class and also point them in the right direction. The Google Doc strategy also works well with the next functionality I will discuss.

Breakout Rooms

As all teachers know, the oldest trick in the book is to put students into pairs or small groups for directed learning activities during an in-person class. However, in the online classroom, this might seem impossible if Zoom did not have the breakout room feature! The breakout rooms can be used very effectively, but proper preparation and explanation are necessary for the students to stay focused in these separate rooms (since you can’t be in all of them at once). The way I have found to make productive use of the breakout rooms is also by leaning on the collaborative nature of Google Docs. Before class, I create the Google Docs, set up the groups, and include in each Doc the rules to the exercise. At the start of class, I explain the group assignment, share the Google Docs with the assigned group members, and split them into their breakout rooms. Then, I can bounce back and forth between the different groups, but can also make sure students in the other rooms are staying on track. Instead of Google Docs, you can also consider using Google Slides and having students end the breakout rooms assignment with a group presentation. A final way to keep students on task is to push messages to all breakout rooms at the same time (for instance, tips or time limits).

Poll

At SAE, we have used the poll feature in our open days to ask participants in these very large marketing events anonymous questions about their interest and appreciation. That said, the poll can also be used for sporadic checks that students have understood the material, as well as to see how students are appreciating the classes to get live feedback. I know that I’ve used the polls a surprising amount to get quick student feedback at the end of classes so I make sure that students are responding to the various activities the way I’d like. You can even use the polls as a way to incite conversation — for instance, in an English-language workshop I run with my French-speaking games students, I gave them polarizing questions related to common debates surrounding video games (for instance, do video games have the potential to make children more violent?). This led to lively debates in English, even though many of the students are not necessarily the first to participate in a different language.

Whiteboard

While there are certainly more functionalities and strategies, I think I will end this post with the whiteboard. Now, I know it’s hard to draw/write properly with the trackpad or even a mouse (not everyone has a tablet/stylus that they can use, for sure), but thankfully the whiteboard comes with the option to type. I’ve found that the whiteboard greatly facilitates group brainstorming activities, mind mapping, as well as helping students work collaboratively in the breakout rooms. Just as with the annotation function, it is easy to take a snapshot of the final result to then share with the students in their LMS, via the chat, or by email.

Conclusion

While online teaching is certainly difficult, hopefully these tips will help you. I know that at first, online teaching was a task that I spent hours and hours prepping for because I was very nervous about how students would react in the online classroom (since I was much more familiar with in-person classes). That said, the more I taught, the more I realized that these types of strategies that make use of the distinguishing features of the online classroom can help reduce prep time and improve student satisfaction. It can certainly seem scary to let more unknown variables into the online classroom (in addition to the typical ones — student and teacher internet connection, being the most important), but I can honestly say, fostering active learning in the online classroom has been the only way I have found to make it so I am not completely drained at the end of a long day of teaching on Zoom. Hopefully they work for you as well! Feel free to leave a comment or share your own strategies below! Together, we can get through these trying times and virtually support each other!

Teaching Online with ViaX

Natalie Berkman

Education has recently been turned on its head as schools all over the world have been forced to migrate their instruction online at the drop of a hat. I have already written a post about how I had to manage such a change in the context of the creative media education we provide at SAE Institute Paris. That said, one of the reasons I was able to make that change so quickly was because of my experience teaching online through the Chinese EdTech, ViaX. Indeed, both during and after my Ph.D., I actively sought out opportunities to work online, as I figured it was the perfect combination of my interests in both the humanities and STEM fields. And since graduating, my work with ViaX as well as with other EdTech companies (more posts to come) has grown in scope. Since I know that many Ph.D.s who are looking to transition out of the academy and into EdTech, I figured that this post might help people understand exactly what this sort of work entails.

1. Getting the Job

In January 2018, I was frantically finishing my dissertation and looking for jobs. I had done some curriculum design work with an EdTech company called Transparent Language the previous summer, as well as an intense amount of teaching English online. While I had a lot of experience teaching French language and literature in a traditional classroom setting at Princeton, as well as mentoring individual students through my work at the Princeton Writing Center, I loved these experiences since they gave me a glimpse into another type of education. Like many people, I had taken a few online classes throughout my own education, but was always somewhat dissatisfied. Curriculum design and teaching online courses myself made me feel like I could correct or improve upon those very aspects that I had found less engaging in my own student experience.

Well, it was right around this time that I got an email from ViaX saying that they found my profile and research interesting and that they suspected that their students might like to take a class with me. The email had a number of encoding issues, so had actually ended up in my spam folder (it turns out that this is a common issue when Chinese emails are received on non-Chinese servers) — thank goodness I checked! After I responded to this preliminary email, I had two interviews with one of their representatives, the second of which was more like a brainstorming about the type of class I could teach. Since their students were very interested in technical training and since they were leaning towards project-based learning, I proposed a course on Digital Humanities that would cover computer-assisted text analysis, something I had a lot of experience with myself, but not much formal training in. I was happy to see from that second interview that we were on the same page, so they sent me a contract and scheduled my first group workshop!

2. Curriculum Design

Before teaching my first workshop in April-May 2018, I had to design the class. And while I had dabbled in curriculum design before as I mentioned above, that was primarily for asynchronous instruction, namely designing reading assignments, multiple-choice quizzes, and various assessments for a class that would not happen in real time. This time, I had to design five classes of two hours each that would be taught synchronously via Zoom, and interface I had never used before save for a few online interviews. On top of that, I had to figure out how to teach technical skills (text encoding, making network graphs, etc.) in such a setting.

My first instinct was to structure the course according to a specific set of texts so that all students would have the same exercises, but then I realized that students would not all have the same interests. It’s true that I could have given them texts that I had already studied and encoded, but this would only be reproducing a certain kind of thinking. Then it hit me — by letting students choose their own topics, they would develop both their critical, analytical skills as well as the technical ones that got them in the classroom in the first place! With that in mind, I began by designing the homework assignments, with each one consisting of a technical assignment to introduce students to the specific tool they were studying that week, and another one more conceptual. The conceptual assignments were cumulative, building on one another to help students arrive at the final assignment, a research proposal.

Then, I began to design the lessons. Since I was used to teaching language classes, I wanted to foster active student participation through pointed questions. Therefore, I structured each lesson to include a number of different types of teaching: a mixture of lecturing, conceptual discussions, technical group activities, student presentations, and more. I hoped that this pedagogical diversity would allow all students to feel comfortable interacting in class, which I knew would help demystify these technical tools. Overall, I was thrilled to get to design the sort of class I wish I had had before starting my digital humanities work!

3. Online Teaching

My first experience teaching my ViaX workshop online was rewarding, but difficult. While I had designed each class with a number of interactive activities, I found it very difficult to get the students to engage with those activities. In class, the first issue I had was that most students signed into Zoom with their Chinese names, which I couldn’t read. Another issue with participation came from technical issues — when all students had their microphones on, I also heard a lot of echos and background noise. Yet, I didn’t want to discourage students from talking. I learned that it was extremely important to set the ground rules in the first lesson, or even before. While these sound like very minor issues, they turned out to be essential to keep the class running smoothly, and my Teaching Assistant was able to help a lot with online classroom etiquette. Finally, it was a challenge to encourage student participation. Not only is it unnatural to participate in an online classroom, but many of the students told me that they weren’t used to this sort of seminar-style class, as in China, the educational system is much more oriented towards lecturing and rote memorization. That said, little by little, I’ve managed to encourage more and more participation in these classes, which all students admit is extremely useful for them.

In addition to the classroom dynamic, certain aspects of the material that seemed second nature to me seemed extremely difficult for the students — for instance, many did not know what a plain text file was, let alone have any idea about how computers function. I realized that, for the next time I taught the class, I had to explain everything, even if I wouldn’t necessarily have considered it in a traditional classroom. Especially considering that many students did not feel comfortable speaking in class, it was hard for me to tell what they understood and what they needed more help on. This was why I also redesigned the homework assignments, making them far more user friendly as well as mandatory, so that I would at least have an email from each student every week. I will likely write another post about online teaching tips and tricks, but overall I have learned that the same pedagogical techniques apply in the online classroom, but are even more important online: especially, setting ground rules, encouraging participation, varying the rhythm of the classes, being explicit about learning objectives, and structuring the delivery so students are constantly in their proximal zone of development.

4. Consulting

In my first six months of working with ViaX, I was consistently impressed with the company’s mission and focus. Something that made me even happier with this job was that this respect was reciprocated — the ViaX team was always available to discuss ideas and work on improving the service together, resulting in my being invited to be a member of their Consulting Board. For instance, when I mentioned to them that their recruitment email had ended up in my spam folder, they were interested in how they could better recruit instructors. We collaborated a lot on this, and now I am often an important part in the hiring process, as many potential instructors want to talk with someone who is happy working with this company. I’ve also helped them with their website, I’ve participated in their webinar series about how to design a popular online class, and much more.

Working with ViaX has not only allowed me to improve my teaching, curriculum design, and consulting skills, but it has also given me a wonderful collection of friendly colleagues. Now I have WeChat on my phone and a dozen or so people I am in constant contact with — I’ve been learning about Chinese culture and education, sharing food pictures, and I even learned that my name in Chinese can be written like this: 娜塔莉 (apparently it’s not a real “name,” but it sounds the same and shows that I’m a girl). They have even sent me a lovely calendar for 2019, and most recently, a huge pack of masks since they were hard to come by in France during confinement!

5 Fallacies About Leaving Academia

Natalie Berkman 4 Comments

It’s now been almost two years to the day that I defended my dissertation, packed my bags, and moved to France to begin a totally new life. While I certainly had some reservations at the time about leaving the academy for good, I can honestly say that I don’t regret this decision in the slightest. Over the next few weeks, I am going to try to blog more regularly about my various #altac experiences, but I figured I would start by debunking a number of misconceptions that I had before leaving and that I expect others have too.

Changing careers — especially after 5-10 years as a sort of apprentice — will always be daunting, but it certainly does not need to be as jarring as it currently is. I will introduce each of these fallacies as a question I most definitely asked myself on more than one occasion towards the end of my graduate studies, and then explain an experience I have had that directly contradicts that fear. While obviously, this blog post only reflects my personal experiences and might not be true for everyone reading, I hope current graduate students or those considering such a career change can find solace in these reflections.

1. Will non-academic work be intellectually fulfilling?

I chose to pursue a Ph.D. because I was passionate about learning. Being paid to read, write, and learn languages sounded like a dream. Since I got to choose my own research topic, I was able to pursue knowledge that I was passionate about, finding intersections between disparate fields and presenting, publishing and teaching everything I learned. One of my biggest fears about leaving was that I would no longer be doing what I loved, or worse — that I would no longer be a lifelong learner.

Perhaps my experience is unique, but I believe I have learned more in the past two years than I learned throughout the entirety of my formal education. Working in a school that has programs dedicated to creative and technical fields such as audio production, filmmaking, and video game creation has allowed me to turn things that used to be hobbies — listening to music, watching movies, and playing video games — into professional development. Now, I get to approach these cultural objects from a new perspective, learn how they are made, and help train the creative media professionals of tomorrow. I have not only learned a great amount about these topics, but I have learned about managing a team, managing budgets, and managing relationships with our university and professional partners. Every day is new and different and I no longer experience that peculiar intellectual burnout that comes with prolonged attention to a single topic.

2. Without conferences and summer breaks, will I be able to travel?

This one is likely specific to working in an international company, but my first week on the job, I was sent to our regional headquarters in Barcelona for training. In my first year alone, I got to attend the Cannes Film Festival (where I actually saw Catherine Deneuve and Sylvester Stallone in person!) as well as a special graduation ceremony for our students at Middlesex University in London. Additionally, now that I live in Europe, I can literally take a weekend in another country, as I did last April when I went to Florence to visit some friends. I even attended a conference last summer in the Netherlands, where I got to discuss my research in a new and exciting location.

3. Without an academic affiliation, will I ever be able to publish my research that I worked so hard on?

Since completing my dissertation, I have been able to get an article accepted for publication in Modern Language Notes (should be out very shortly!), an essay in a collected volume (the editors are currently looking for an outlet), and a third article in a special edition of Études littéraires (also forthcoming, but likely delayed due to the current pandemic). On top of that, I was invited to a journée d’études at the École Normale Supérieure to present my research on the Oulipo as well as to the annual History of Science Society conference to present my research on Bourbaki where I was even contacted by an editor who wanted to learn if I had any book projects on the horizon! While I was pretty satisfied with all of that, I was even selected as a winner of the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in French Studies, an honor that came with a book contract. I am now diligently working on revising my dissertation into the book manuscript I always dreamed it would be (another blog post to follow on this!). Surely not everyone who leaves academia wants to continue publishing, but for me, it felt important to find an audience for all of that work I did that was a bit wider than my dissertation committee. So if anyone else feels the same way, I can promise you that publishing is still very much possible without an academic affiliation.

4. With my extremely specific training, will I even be able to do a non-academic job?

This was one of my biggest concerns. In France, every job has a 3-4 month trial period, during which both you and the company are able to call it quits with no repercussions. At the beginning, I was pretty nervous that I was going to fail that trial period, especially considering the fact that upon arrival, I was informed that my job was in fact a management position. Not only that, but that I was essentially the #2 at the school. It was almost summer vacation, much of the staff had already left for weeks of vacation. I had to spend the majority of my trial period figuring things out by myself, understanding the challenges the school was facing, and putting in place processes and procedures. After a few weeks of getting the lay of the land, I realized that my graduate training was indeed enough to manage this situation. I was good at looking at complex situations, analyzing data, and isolating problems; I had extensive experience managing large projects longterm from my Digital Humanities work and my dissertation; and most importantly, I was good at communicating to people at different levels and helping everyone understand what was at stake in our work. So it turns out those fears were unfounded — a Ph.D. is training for a specific profession, yes, but it is also legitimate work experience. Once you can prove that to an employer and get a contract, there is no doubt that you can excel in whatever job you land!

5. What if I regret leaving?

This was perhaps my biggest fear, especially considering the fact that it seems unlikely to secure a tenure-track position from outside of the academy. While it’s true that I’m still teaching and publishing, I do indeed suspect that hiring committees would prefer a candidate with a more traditional academic trajectory than mine. This may just be yet another misconception, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Indeed, I’ve barely glanced at the academic job ads (which were already limited in my field) and even if there were a dream job, I’m not even sure that I would be interested in applying. Now that I’m managing not just an academic department, but all the academics at a school, why on earth would I want to take a serious title cut and become an Assistant Professor? Why would I want to give up the freedom of living where I want to live in order to be on a track, where my future will be far more limited than it is now? Long story short, I don’t regret this decision at all.

While it is impossible to know if I would be happy elsewhere, I feel confident that this decision was right for me. In fact, in the middle of this global crisis, all I can think of is what would have happened if I had taken one of the two postdoctoral fellowships that I was offered back in 2018. If so, then I would be at the end of one of those two-year positions, counting down the days until both my income and health care expired and most likely without another academic appointment in hand. Instead, I am living in Paris with my wonderful husband, working a job I love with fantastic colleagues, and still getting the chance to engage in the teaching and research that first brought me to higher education.

As it turns out, even my biggest fear about leaving academia was totally unfounded. Since we are once again at the end of what was bound to be a grueling cycle of academic hiring, I hope this post can help those who might be facing a difficult decision in the midst of uncertain times. Best of luck to all!

Creative Media Education…Online?

Natalie Berkman

Given the current confinement situation, at SAE Institute Paris, we have had to move all of our classes online with little to no time to prepare. While this has been the case for many schools, migrating classes on how to film a movie on a set or how to do a live studio recording is pretty difficult. So, I wrote this post for our website about the unique challenges and opportunities that came with this abrupt change. Please feel free to check it out on the SAE website!

2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in French Studies

Natalie Berkman

I am pleased to announce that my dissertation, The Oulipo’s Mathematical Project (1960-2014) was just announced one of the winners of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in French Studies! Looking at the titles of my fellow winners’ work, I can see that I am in very good company. This means that my manuscript is now under contract with Peter Lang Oxford, so please keep a lookout for it in 2021!

Winners of the 2019 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in French Studies

 

My Plan for TEL Practice Improvement

Natalie Berkman

The following is a blog post that I completed for the Navitas Module: Reflecting on Technology-Enhanced Learning Practices. In it, I reflect on how we can enhance learning practices with the use of technology in a school like SAE Institute Paris, which exclusively aims to train students to become future professionals in the creative media industry, necessitating technology at every step of the way.

At SAE Institute Paris, we are lucky that the disciplines we specialize in already demand technology-enhanced learning practices. Clearly, it is impossible to teach a student to become an audio engineer, filmmaker, or video game creator without covering certain fundamental software and equipment. Therefore, despite typical resistance to more active learning practices, our courses are by nature interactive, project-based, and technology-enhanced.

That said, there is always room for improvement. As the Academic Coordinator, I’ve often found it ironic that our teaching staff of industry professionals, while technologically proficient, has been particularly resistant to making better use of our LMS (Canvas). Indeed, it was one of my first goals to implement this at a very basic level, by making sure students had an essential repository of information including pedagogical materials related to their coursework and their summative assessment guidelines. Now that this has been implemented, I intend to move beyond such basic measures and develop and implement a real LMS strategy for the school.

Based on Bennett’s Digital Practitioner Framework pyramid, our campus is somewhere between “Skills” and “Practices” in that we apply technology to learning, but not consistently and teachers are not currently making informed choices about how to use technologies. They use the technologies as necessary, but need to develop strategies to properly incorporate them into classes so that our students see the value in these pedagogical methods.

Through insights gained from participating in this course and from my interactions with fellow participants (which were unfortunately not as prolonged as I would have liked, given my delay in accessing the Moodle), I have seen that there is no “one size fits all” model for TEL practice improvement. Indeed, since the situation at SAE Institute is quite different from more traditional academic settings, I will need to be equally innovative in the TEL practices I try to promote. Given my own relatively “traditional” background, I’m hoping that by developing and implementing a proper LMS strategy for SAE Paris, I will be able to learn which types of TEL practices are most successful in various academic context and thereby be better prepared in my own teaching, curriculum design, and EdTech work outside of SAE.