Person Up: A Model of Individualized and Scaleable Professional Development

Presented by:

• Alex Rockey, PhD, Instructional Technology Instructor, Bakersfield College
• Pam Rivers, Assistant Director of Academic Technology and Professional Development, Bakersfield College
• Matt Andrasian-Jones, Instructional Technology Instructor, Bakersfield College

Speaker Bios:

• Alex Rockey, PhD, is an instructional technologist instructor at Bakersfield College. As an educator with K-16 teaching experience, Alex has taught online teaching courses to faculty, first-year writing at the college level, and high school English and Puente. Her interests include humanizing online education, accessibility, and mobile learning and design. Alex is passionate about the potential of mobile design to improve student access to high-quality educational opportunities.
• Pamela Rivers is the Assistant Director of Academic Technology and Professional Development at Bakersfield College. She has worked at BC for four years and before that worked in K-12 education for 17 years. She has a Master’s Degree in Educational Technology and a Master’s Degree in English. Some of Pam’s interests include equity in education. Open Educational Resources and using technology to improve learning outcomes.
• Matt lives to play, tinker, and ideate. A constructivist who leans toward constructionism, Matt began his educational technology career 19 years ago as a swim coach, where he challenged the status quo of pool deck instruction. He is now an Instructional Technology Instructor at Bakersfield College, where he focuses on and leads efforts regarding Professional Development, Sound Pedagogy, and Accessibility. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Educational Learning Technologies Program at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology.

Session Info:

The Person Up fellowship was launched in the spring of 2021 to offer a highly-individualized and scalable model of instructional design at Bakersfield College. In this fellowship, faculty were paired with an instructional designer to create a high-quality course shell that could be shared with colleagues in their department. This model of instructional design allowed limited Academic Technology staff at Bakersfield College to provide meaningful professional development to individual faculty. This professional development became scalable as Person Up fellows used this professional development to guide faculty in their department in implementing the course shell in their own teaching. To empower faculty in equity-minded course design, eight foundational principles of “equity and inclusion by design” (Presidents Forum, 2020) guided the redesign of courses in the fellowship. These eight foundational principles meant that courses were: modular, mobile-friendly, visually-appealing, humanized, equity-minded, mostly OER, badged, and data-based. 27 credit courses and 12 non-credit courses were designed between Spring 2021 and Fall 2021.

This interactive session will offer insight into both the student, faculty, and administrative perspective of this fellowship. First, we will present the student perspective by sharing survey data exploring the experience of students taking Person Up courses. Second, we will share the faculty perspective through a virtual gallery walk in which participants can watch short 60-second videos in which faculty highlight their major takeaways from this fellowship. Finally, we will attend to the administrative perspective by exploring large-scale impacts of this fellowship on the campus community and culture.

Session Outcomes:

• Understand student, faculty, and administrative perspectives of the Person Up fellowship.
• Identify equity-minded course design strategies they can enact on their campus after completing a virtual gallery walk.

Session Resources:

PersonUp a Model of Indiv ROCKEY