Design Story

Maya

In 2022, Maya was having one of the best years of her life. She had recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Finance in the Spring of that year. She had been working as a Financial Planner in her small, mountain, hometown for almost a decade. While working full-time, she drove to classes in Atlanta twice a week for over 3 years. The classes toward the end of her degree were online, allowing more time to search for her next step and apply and interview for the jobs that piqued her interest. She was open to a wide range of opportunities but knew that she wanted to move into a larger city and experience a new place to call home for a while. 

Maya attended meetings at several large firms across the southeast, but the interview that really stuck with her was a small private college with a robust online/evening program for working professionals. Before becoming a CFP (Certified Financial Planner), she had earned her M.B.A. while working at the state university that she attended as an undergraduate. She had experience working in higher education, and she could appreciate the mission of the small private school’s programs since she had also been an adult student. She had experience as a traditional student (Bachelor’s), an evening student (Master’s), and an online student (Ph.D.), and had worked in her field of expertise for several years. She was passionate about helping individuals and families make wise financial decisions and felt her work experience could be helpful for adult students who were likely looking to advance or change careers. 

Maya had no college classroom teaching experience but had been lucky enough to be a student of several amazing professors over the past few years as a student. She had planned and led her firm’s CE credit training several times, and even had a financial advice blog and podcast. She was comfortable working with technology and handled her firm's advertising, web presence, and social media platforms (and handled them well, amassing over 250k followers). She was assured by the hiring manager that there were several teaching workshops and a supportive learning environment staff available. Her new college used a learning management system (LMS) that she wasn’t familiar with, but she assumed it couldn’t be much different from the one she experienced as a student. 

Maya was assigned to teach two of the most difficult courses in the program - courses that covered contingency planning, retirement, insurance, and estate planning. While these topics can be tough to discuss on their own, Maya knew that students would need a strong knowledge base of tax and law in order to be successful with the content. One of the former instructors had recently retired and had passed all of his accumulated resources along to Maya before he left the college. The other instructor did not. He deleted all past class activity and removed all content from any shared drives. Because the content of these courses needs to be updated frequently as laws, tax codes, and limits change, Maya had expected to create much of the content from scratch but wished she knew what students were accustomed to doing in their earlier classes. She didn’t know how much of the content had already been covered, and where she needed to pick up with new lessons. She was beginning to feel overwhelmed. She scheduled a consultation with the Teaching & Learning Office for the following week. She was emailed a list of resources and told to bring her laptop to the meeting so she could review her course with the T&L Specialist. 

But what class? Maya didn’t have a class prepared to show. There was no demo prepared to review for tips and pointers. She had a GoogleDrive folder full of pdfs, several websites bookmarked, a few podcasts saved, and several YouTube playlists. How could she put this all together in a structured format for her students?

With Clicky, Maya could open her course in the LMS, and be guided through questions to quickly establish a modular course structure. Clicky would first create an outline for the course, then provide templates for each needed element that Maya could adjust for her content. Maya could view examples of course elements and select the components that fit her and her students' needs.