Leading a full-year honours thesis course (UBC POLI492)

As the course instructor for my department's honours thesis seminar in 2022, 2024, and 2025, I coached 15-18 students to complete their honours thesis. The course is worth double, and it's a full year, so the expectations for this research area very high -- not appreciably different than a master's thesis in fact. I see myself as a guide, advisor, coach, supporter, and facilitator rather than as an 'instructor'.



Adventures in Edtech – Lessons Learned

I've been involved in the creation of learning technology inside the university and outside the university. I've led a Faculty-level learning tech and IT team in the creation of new tools and the marketing and support for new and existing tools. I've started two edtech companies and done application development, UI/UX design, legal, marketing, sales, user onboarding, and user support.

What have I learned? Don't be naive. Be realistic.



Using Notion for Courses with Group Work

I teach a course with students in a small group through the whole term, building public facing websites. I give lots of feedback along the way, essentially coaching more than teaching.
In 2020 I tried using Notion for the whole process: all of the scaffolded group work, my coaching, and then the public-facing website. It was a huge success. This is the story.



Prograds – The Grad Student Progress App

For years I was frustrated with how we track grad students' progress and supervise them. PhD committees don't share notes, department information is inaccessible to supervisors, students are stressed that their committee doesn't know what they're working on and what stage they're at. So I solved this problem with a web application built on no-code platform Bubble. It's live at Prograds.com and we've got paying customers at U of Toronto, UMass-Amherst, Texas A&M, Tenessee Tech, UBC, Mount Allison



Building an ePortfolio platform: portfolio.arts.ubc.ca

As Director of Arts ISIT I led a project to build an ePortfolio tool from scratch on the Wordpress platform. Collaborating with Jason Myers, Michael Ha, Letitia Henville, Heidi May, Ricardo Serrano, Angela Lam, Leanna Chow, and Julie Walchli, we did it.



The Rich Transcripts Project at UBC Political Science

I am leading an effort to collect information on the learning experience, learning activities, and output of students in all UBC Political Science courses. We then aggregate that information by student to produce what we call a "Rich Transcript" showing what each student did in the course in their Political Science major. Feedback from students has been very positive.