You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Few people have challenged my thinking about learning innovation more than Rolin Moe. When Rolin let me know that he has a new gig as Dean of Academic Support and Learning Technologies at Skyline College, I knew it was time for a check-in.
Q1: Congrats on becoming a Dean! Our learning innovation community is always wondering what happens when one of us moves to an academic leadership role. How did you end up at Skyline College?
I’m on the record as a skeptic of the concept of innovation; my research recognizes innovation as remarkably problematic but also a term fueling current policies and projects. Because of this, it is important to look for the places that are aligning innovation with progressive structures and pathways rather than pushing or pulling the hype. That’s how I came to know Skyline College, as a place quietly but powerfully aligning innovation with the community collaboration and camaraderie that is integral to success. I first became aware of their President’s Innovation Fund in 2016, but the college has been supporting innovation through this fund since 2002, and their method is unique. In short, they get money directly to faculty and staff to develop, build and measure their efforts. If the innovation is a success, there is an opportunity to roll it into operations. If it does not meet the success measures, it didn’t cost a whole lot of money and it helped to further the collaborative spirit of a student-ready campus.
I had long been interested in working in the community college system but it was difficult to know where to look or how my experience would relate to a different environment. I am fortunate to know James Glapa-Grossklag, the Dean of Education Technology, Learning Resources & Distance Education at College of the Canyons (as well as global leader in the OER movement), and he helped me to recognize where my experience could be beneficial to a community college. I have a broad background so finding the right fit was going to be difficult. So when it turned out Skyline College had an opening for a dean overseeing edtech, distance education, professional development, tutoring, library...it was the opportunity I had been looking for.
Q2: Tell us a bit about Skyline College, and what you will be doing at the College?
Skyline College is a comprehensive community college in San Bruno, about 15 miles south of Downtown San Francisco and 40 miles north of San Jose. The college was established in 1969, and built into its mission and foundation are issues of equity and social justice through critical conversations about race, gender and sexual identity. Inherent to that work is a critical eye towards pedagogy, institutional structures and the history of education, and recognizing that interplay as foundational to the education experience is paramount. Our student population lives in the shadow of the tech industry, yet the majority of our students come from historically underrepresented populations in higher education. There is a space here to have big conversations about education and its relationship with and responsibilities to society and cultures (and conversations that result in action), but at the same time we are the community’s opportunity for quality learning so we need to also have regular conversations about things like improving the Wi-Fi, providing quality tutoring for online students and developing equity-minded syllabi.
There is a lot to the job. On a day-to-day level, I oversee the campus library, our tutoring center, teacher professional development, classroom technology, distance education, and the subheads/topics within those categories. On a meta level, I work with the campus and district to establish strategic visions around online education, campus technology, student support, professional learning, learning methodologies and more. Many of those large conversations move only because we break them into smaller conversations where we can assess situations, collaborate on programs to address the situation, and fold lessons learned into the bigger picture.
Q3: Okay, that sounds like a big job. How are you going to find time to engage in scholarship? What research and writing projects are you working on?
The kind of scholarship academia desperately needs right now is happening at community colleges across the nation. It’s the scholarship of teaching and learning, the scholarship of engagement and the scholarship of integration. For a few years now I’ve been advocating for a greater adoption of this scholarship, Ernest Boyer’s framework from Scholarship Reconsidered 30 years after publication. I have advocated for support of this scholarship to be structural in university processes for tenure, promotion and review, but the structural response has been largely stagnant: people love this sort of scholarship but are afraid to change the way academia traditionally operates. So now I am at an institution that is performing this work seen integral to its mission, and where there are not historic expectations holding the scholarship of discovery on a pedestal.
It’s a two-step process for me to work on scholarship. First, it’s about empowering faculty, staff and administration to see the relationship of their work to these emergent forms of scholarship and providing support and scaffolding for seeing it through to publication. That starts with how our campus works with our district to conceptualize and practice IRB, but it also must quickly recognize how our reward structures in terms of evaluation and performance can be aligned to highlight and amplify the production of this research. There is a remarkable opportunity for community colleges to be at the forefront of emergent scholarship, and we are poised to lead that charge.
At the same time, keeping up with my writing is important. Fortunately for me, edtech is a field with many administrators who are able to find opportunities to share their experience and expertise through publication, so there is a lot of support and history here. I am working on a book on academic innovation; it’s a comprehensive look at the meaninglessness as well as meaningfulness of the term, how that incongruence has driven recent higher education discourse, what could happen if left unchecked, and how scholars, practitioners and students can have a more active voice in shaping the future because of this very term.
What do you want to ask Rolin Moe?
