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C H R I S G A R G I U L O

Application for Promotion to C4

Fall 2014

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Table of Contents

Introduction 6  Brief Summary of Accomplishments ................................................................................ 6  Criteria .............................................................................................................................. 7  

Associate Professor (C4) ................................................................................................ 7  Checklist ............................................................................................................................ 9  

Primary Duties .............................................................................................................. 9  Professional Development ............................................................................................ 9  Service ......................................................................................................................... 10  Leadership .................................................................................................................. 10  

Background Information ................................................................................................. 12  Brief Biography ............................................................................................................ 12  What is New Media Art? .............................................................................................. 13  What is Interface Design? ........................................................................................... 14  Who are the NMA Students? ....................................................................................... 15  

A Sample of NMA Students .................................................................................... 17  Primary Duties 21  

Teaching .......................................................................................................................... 23  Teaching Philosophy .................................................................................................. 23  Teaching Methodologies ............................................................................................ 26  

Blog-Style Lessons ................................................................................................. 40  Video Lessons .......................................................................................................... 41  The Five D-D-D-D-D’s ........................................................................................... 43  The Three S-S-S’s ................................................................................................... 44  The Three I-I-I’s ..................................................................................................... 47  

Courses Taught ........................................................................................................... 49  ART 128 Interface Programming 1 ......................................................................... 51  ART 155 Information Architecture ........................................................................ 52  ART 222 Digital Multimedia .................................................................................. 53  ART 249 Interface Design 2 ................................................................................... 54  ART 257 Motion Graphic Design ........................................................................... 55  ART 258 Interface Programming 2 ....................................................................... 56  ART 285 Interface Design Studio .......................................................................... 57  ART 293 NMA Internship ...................................................................................... 58  ART 299 Independent Study ................................................................................. 59  

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Teaching Assessment ................................................................................................. 60  Coordinating ................................................................................................................... 63  

NMA Discipline Coordinator ...................................................................................... 63  Typical Coordinator Responsibilities .................................................................... 67  NMA-Specific Coordinator Responsibilities: ........................................................ 68  

Evaluations ..................................................................................................................... 69  Student Evaluations ................................................................................................... 69  Peer Evaluations .......................................................................................................... 75  

Professional Development 79  Conferences, Talks, & Events ......................................................................................... 81  

Conferences ................................................................................................................. 81  Talks and Events ......................................................................................................... 83  

Self-Learning Initiatives ................................................................................................. 84  Online Courses & Webinars ....................................................................................... 85  Podcasts ...................................................................................................................... 85  Museum Visits ............................................................................................................ 85  Freelance Design Work .............................................................................................. 85  Artwork ....................................................................................................................... 86  Professional Memberships ......................................................................................... 87  

Service 88  Service to My Discipline ................................................................................................. 89  Service to My Department .............................................................................................. 89  Service to The College ..................................................................................................... 90  Service to The UH-System .............................................................................................. 90  Service to The Community .............................................................................................. 91  

Leadership 94  Five Year Curriculum Updates ....................................................................................... 94  Program-level Assessment ............................................................................................. 94  Course-level Assessment ................................................................................................ 95  New Studio Courses ........................................................................................................ 95  Helping My Colleagues ................................................................................................... 96  

Conclusion 98  Thank you ....................................................................................................................... 98  

Sources: 100  

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INTRODUCTION

Brief Summary of Accomplishments

Since my last application for promotion, I have grown to become a more mature teacher and leader.

I have been teaching at Kapiʻolani Community College (KCC) within the New Media Arts (NMA) program since the fall of 2005. Over the years, my teaching has improved by implementing new teaching practices and methodologies and by refining my course materials every semester. I embraced the responsibility of being a leader within the NMA program as a discipline coordinator for four of the past five years.

My professional development initiatives included attending conferences and self-learning activities that have increased my level of expertise in my field and improved my awareness and understanding of the student experience. I provided service at various levels to my program, department, campus, and community. I learned much inside and outside of the classroom about curricular design and assessment practices on both the course and program level. Most importantly, I feel proud and honored to witness my students’ graduate and become successful designers in the local industry.

The intent of this dossier is to provide documentation that I am currently operating at the C4 level of associate professor. My hope is that the structure, visual layout, and checklists provided make it easier for readers and reviewers to make that determination. Enjoy.

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Criteria

Associate Professor (C4)

The contents of this dossier are designed to demonstrate that I meet the criteria for faculty applying for promotion to C4 Associate Professor in the following categories: Primary Duties, Professional Development, Service, and Leadership.

“Faculty at Rank 4 perform consistently at a highly effective professional and productive level in the area of primary responsibilities. They maintain their expertise in current discipline content and methodologies, and in the understanding of student needs. They provide individual leadership to colleagues in their discipline area, college, or university. In addition, they work with colleagues in other disciplines to facilitate student learning. They initiate, coordinate, and participate in discipline-related projects at the campus or system level to include significant program or curricular modification. It is expected that they will provide significant service to the college and community outside of the area of primary responsibilities and that they will sustain involvement in professional and self-development activities. Faculty at this rank are expected to accept appointments to serve as Division or Department Chairpersons. Other examples of leadership may include involvement in program review and other assessment and planning activities for the campus.”

Guidelines For Tenure And Promotion University Of Hawai‘i Community Colleges 2014- 2015

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Primary Duties Prof. Development

Service Leadership

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Checklist

Primary Duties

R Over the past five years, I taught nine different NMA courses. Each course has its own web page with custom lessons, presentations, exercises, and projects that are continually modified and improved upon every year.

R For four of the past five years, I served as NMA discipline coordinator, providing leadership and administrative duties that contributed to a healthy and successful program.

R Every semester, I receive positive student evaluations. R Many of my students have gone on to graduate and become successful

designers in the local industry.

Professional Development

R Over the past five years, I attended eight conferences, including three national conferences (2012 AIGA Design Educators Conference, CSS Dev Conference 2012, InControl Conference 2012), and five local conferences (TechHui Conference 2010 & 2011, Unconferenz 2009, 2010, & 2011).

R I attended several local talks and lectures (e.g. AIGA Design Week Symposium 2013) and online webinars (e.g. Adobe-AIGA Responsive Web Design: Design Once, Display Everywhere Webinar 2011).

R I continually stay up-to-date on new developments in interface design through a variety of self-learning initiatives and industry-relevant sources such as books, articles, blogs, online courses, videos, and podcasts.

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Checklist

Service

R I redesigned and maintained the NMA web site and managed the production of all promotional materials, including the new NMA brochure.

R I served on two NMA full-time faculty screening committees. R I gave several NMA program presentations to various local and visiting

schools, including Jarrett Middle School Career Day presentation in Palolo (2010) and the Hokua University Graduation presentation (2012).

R I served as faculty advisor for the NMA AIGA student group and NMA Club each year for the past five years.

R I served on four Department Personnel Committees (DPC), two for my department and two counseling DPC’s.

R I served on seven Tenure and Promotion Review Committees (TPRC), chairperson for three and convener for one.

R I served on two non-discipline screening committees (Pathways Learning Support 2011 and CELTT Web Developer 2014)

R I gave several local talks and presentations that were open to the public, including being a presenter, panelist, and critic at the AIGA Design Forum 2012 and presenter at MacFest 2010.

R Since 2011, I have served on the advisory board for Alani Children’s Center.

Leadership

R I led and organized the five-year course updates for NMA courses in 2012. R Each year for the past five years, I led and organized the annual NMA

program-level SLO assessment practice. R I led and implemented the NMA course-level assessment system in 2013. R I led the development and approval process for two new NMA courses. R I mentored several young faculty members.

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Figure 1: Chris Gargiulo presenting at the 2012 AIGA Design Forum at UH Manoa

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Background Information

“I enjoy both the left-brained technical programming and the right-brained visual design aspects of my field.”

Brief Biography

I am a designer and teacher with experience in print design, web design, front-end web development, motion graphics, and animation for various film, web, and multimedia projects.

Teacher

Since 2005, I’ve been teaching interface design within the NMA program at KCC. My academic interests center around the intersection of art, design, and technology. Before moving to Hawaii, I taught at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

Designer

Prior to teaching, I worked at various design and advertising companies from New York City to Los Angeles. My client work includes Samsung, Sony, ABC, Warner Brothers, Six Flags, Hasbro, Marvel Comics, Princess Cruises, and others.

Artist

I periodically create artwork for gallery shows and film festivals. My most recent artwork was on display at the Koa Gallery Faculty Biennial Show in March 2014.

Student

I received my M.F.A. in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design and my B.A. in Fine Art from Amherst College.

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NMA

What is New Media Art?

New Media Art does not have a universally accepted definition. Some academic institutions with similar programs prefer related terms such as digital art, digital media, and computer graphics.

My personal definition for New Media Art is that it is: “an emerging interdisciplinary study of the convergence of art, design, and technology. Essential to this evolving discipline is the examination of how new technologies are affecting the creative process and the human condition.”

If I were to try to compartmentalize it within the context of existing academic disciplines, I would place it under a large umbrella of humanities, and then under the combination of art and communications.

There are several overlapping sub domains and related disciplines with close ties to New Media Art, including graphic design, user experience design (UX), information architecture (IA), human computer interaction (HCI), filmmaking, animation, and multimedia design, to name a few. The NMA program at KCC focuses on two specific concentration areas of New Media Art: 1) animation and 2) interface design. I teach on the interface design side.

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Interface Design

What is Interface Design?

Interface design is a broad term for the study of the design of interfaces for various applications such as web sites, mobile applications, games, DVD’s, and interactive kiosks.

The study of interface design spans multiple disciplines, including art, design, graphic design, communications, computer science, information science, information technology, and psychology, to name a few. As a two year Associate of Science (A.S.) degree program, the KCC NMA interface design curriculum is primarily focused on web design.

In terms of industry web design positions available, there are two opposite sides of the job spectrum: web designer and web developer. A web designer is typically a right-brained visual designer capable of creating graphics and designing layouts.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is a left-brained web developer, typically a programmer responsible for the technical functionality of a web site. The NMA interface design curriculum is unique in that it is designed to cater toward both, but with more weight on the visual interface design. This field requires a combination of both design and technical skills. Within the interface design curriculum, my strengths lie in teaching courses that focus on user experience design (UX), user interface design (UI), and front-end web development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

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NMA Students

Who are the NMA Students?

NMA students come from diverse backgrounds with a wide range of existing skills and varying goals for what they want to accomplish after graduating.

The age of NMA students ranges from being fresh out of high school to being middle-aged and looking for a new career to being retired and following one’s personal interests. Some have a high school degree only, while others already have bachelors, or graduate degrees, and are looking for training that will help them get a job or start a new career path.

NMA is a select admissions program. Students must take pre-requisite art courses and submit a portfolio for review before being accepted into the program. This admissions process helps to ensure that students have a basic foundation of skills necessary to succeed in our challenging and competitive program.

Despite the screening of students, NMA students enter the program with different sets of existing skills. Some are talented illustrators and artists, and others have limited backgrounds in art. Some have been using computers for many years, and others are relatively novices. Trying to design lessons for students of varying skill level is a common challenge teaching in this field.

Individual student goals range from endeavoring to work immediately after graduation within the local industry, to hoping to start their own businesses, to planning on continuing their education in pursuit of a higher degree. Most NMA students want to secure a job in the local industry immediately after graduation. With these factors in mind, my ultimate challenge is to best prepare NMA students to be successful in their next step in life, no matter what career or educational direction they wish to pursue.

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Figure 2: NMA Student Chad Sagaysay

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A Sample of NMA Students

Below is a sample list of fictional NMA students that are based on some of my real students. Collectively, they represent the diversity of NMA students. For privacy, I modified their names, genders, and descriptive details to protect their anonymity.

Noa “The Surprise” Noa is a native Hawaiian student that initially did not get into the NMA program. She was ranked #16 and we only accept 15 students. Due to a policy change that I implemented as coordinator, Noa was able to join the program when another student went part-time. Noa struggled at first, but then blossomed during her 2nd year. An independent self-learner, she pushed the limits of our front-end coding courses, so I placed her at a local web development company for her internship, which turned into a full-time job offer after graduation.

Alex “The UHM Transfer” Alex joined the NMA program straight from Roosevelt high school. Upon graduating from the NMA program, he wanted to continue his studies in design, but was faced with transfer hurtles that many NMA AS graduates face. I encouraged Alex to overcome these challenges, which he managed to do by taking several years to complete his pre-requisite coursework for the UH Manoa Graphic Design program. His determination paid off with his acceptance and he is currently studying there now.

Karl “The PhD” Originally from Korea, Karl earned his PhD in in a Communications and Information Science at UH Manoa. Karl decided to join the NMA program with the dual goal of learning more applied technical skills in web design, to complement his theoretical research-oriented background and to learn how to become a teacher. Karl is over 50 years old and has kindly shared his wisdom, knowledge, and experience with his younger classmates.

Kali “The Extreme Athlete” Kali came into the program straight from Kamehameha High School with a passion for photography and actions sports. She immediately gravitated toward video production, incorporating videos of her friends skating and surfing into every one of her projects. I placed her in an internship with a local extreme sports TV production company, where she has been their in-house video editor and designer ever since. She now has a career doing what she loves and her work can regularly be seen on local TV.

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Maya “The Career Professional” Maya is in her mid-twenties and already has a bachelors degree in a field she is no longer interested in, so she came to NMA to get the practical web design skills that she knew she needed to get a job in web design. She loved to code, so I placed her at a cutting-edge local tech company for her internship, where she blossomed to a fault. She spent more time at her internship than her coursework. She ultimately did not complete the degree, but she didn’t care, because she got a job offer from her internship and is still there today, happy and successful.

Lea “The International Student” Originally from Japan, Lea speaks very little English. She is passionate about design, but has difficulty following class lectures. She did well in the NMA program, created a solid portfolio, but upon graduation she was unable to secure a local job that offered a work visa so she could stay in Hawaii, so she reluctantly moved back to Japan. I recently learned that she is the in-house web designer for her father’s company.

Alana “The Over-achiever” Slightly more mature than her classmates (age mid twenties), Alana worked hard and put in long hours through her duration in the NMA program. She was a delight to have in the classroom, always setting the bar high for her classmates to aspire toward. Upon graduating from the NMA program, many top local companies gave her job offers and I helped advise her as she chose the best options for her career. She is a thriving local designer doing great things here in Hawaii. I run into her often at local AIGA events, where she serves as a board member.

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Figure 3: Chris Gargiulo in one of the NMA classrooms teaching a technical lesson via projector.

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PRIMARY DUTIES

Over the past five years, my primary duties were split between teaching and coordinating the NMA program.

Teaching

My primary responsibility is teaching. Over the past five years, I taught nine different courses. Each course has its own web page with custom course lessons, exercises, and projects.

75%

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Coordinating

My other primary responsibility is coordinating the NMA program. For five of the past six years, I received three credits of teaching equivalency (TE) per semester as discipline coordinator.

25%

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Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

I am a practical teacher and designer. My approach to teaching is similar to my approach toward my career working in the design industry: be resourceful, be professional, and have fun.

These three pragmatic principles are the tenets that have guided me through my career. I find them to be particularly relevant within the academic context of teaching interface design at KCC within the NMA program where students pursue a course of study that is scholarly, practical, and fun at the same time.

The Two Year Challenge

One of the greatest challenges as a teacher within the NMA program is figuring out how to best prepare students for a career in interface design in only two years. In my opinion, all young students and aspiring designers should ideally get as much education as possible, such as a terminal graduate degree, before starting their professional careers. Unfortunately, this is not realistic or feasible for many students. In an attempt to address this challenge, my goal is to develop the most efficient curriculum so that all students, regardless of skill level, background, or experience, will be prepared for a career in the field upon graduation. One of my primary and most effective solutions to this problem is a practical one: teaching using the industry model.

The Industry Model

Instead of lecturing from the front of the class, I find it effective to teach by acting as a creative director leading a team of designers, as if we were all co-workers in a local company. All assignments are designed to mimic real world projects found in the industry and are specifically intended to become items in their portfolio, which will be the single most important asset for graduates when applying for jobs in the industry. This real-world setting embraces a studio-based learning model1 that allows for me to introduce the full creative design process and new technologies that students will see in the industry in a controlled academic setting. The industry model alone is not sufficient. Students need a strong theoretical foundation in design and design history that will empower and enable

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them to make informed decisions when solving design problems. To address this challenge, I embrace more traditional learning models.

Dewey and Project-Based Learning

My teaching style is most closely aligned with the pragmatic educational philosophies of John Dewey and the principles of constructivist learning theory. Dewey was a proponent of learning skills and knowledge via hands-on exercises that can be applied in real world situations. All of my courses employ project-based learning2, which includes inquiry-based learning3 and problem-based learning4. All projects start with a real world problem that students need to solve. Through the process of inquiry, I am able to teach design principles and theory in a targeted manner to help students as they solve design problems and expand their vocabulary to communicate their work. Through select readings and lectures that provide appropriate and relevant background information specific to their coursework, I try to highlight the importance of how being resourceful can help designers better solve project-based design problems. Through a combination of the practical industry model and traditional learning methods, the shared goal is to provide for students a solid foundation of knowledge and real world applied skills necessary to inform each and every design decision that they make as they synthesize theory and practice via the production of real world projects.

Assessment

For assessment, I use formal studio art critiques, a popular practice in art education. Formal studio art critiques consist of a student presenter who defends a piece of his or her artwork in front of a panel of critics who analyze the work and comment on its strengths and weaknesses according to a set of guidelines developed for each project. The outcome of this method is that students learn how to solve their own design problems by critically defending and discussing their design process in a public speaking forum while witnessing the experiences of others. During each critique, I use custom grading rubrics to apply Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy to measure whether students are remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, and evaluating what they have learned while creating their own artwork.

Passion & Engagement

All of my students and colleagues know that I am passionate about web design. I am a self-proclaimed geek and I wear this label on my sleeve. Not all students share my level of passion and interest, so one of my most important teaching goals is to try to engage and motivate students to embrace being students of design. One method for generating interest is to begin each class with an anticipatory set. An anticipatory set is a brief activity at the beginning of a class or lesson that is designed to engage the students’

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attention and direct their focus on the learning objective for that particular lesson. I usually show examples of artwork and designs created by different artists and companies, and then discuss them. This practice helps to address the primacy-recency effect of student learning, where students often remember the first thing you do at the beginning of a class session. It also initiates dialogue in the classroom and demonstrates how we can learn by looking at existing art and design, listening to others, and becoming better public speakers with an expanded design vocabulary.

It’s all about having fun

My ultimate aim is for students to have fun. I try to create a comfortable learning environment where students can study web design and prepare themselves for a career in the field while enjoying themselves at the same time. I try to periodically remind my students that I am a student-for-life. Learning does not end upon graduation in this field and I certainly do not know everything. For example, often times I am presented with an interesting question or complex design problem where my common reply is, “I do not know.” I always try to follow this statement up with a question, “how can we figure this out?” Then I try to empower them with confidence and support them by saying, “you can do this, let me help you get started.” In this context, the role of the teacher is a co-learner who shares personal knowledge and passion for learning with students in the pursuit of collective community growth. The role of the student is to listen and share with the goal of learning through academic discourse and critical thinking. Ultimately, nothing makes me happier than to see my students make informed design decisions via a critical thought process, justify their decisions by speaking about them in a professional and articulate manner, and get excited about being a designer in today’s world of new media.

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Teaching Methodologies

Over the past decade, I developed a series of personal instructional methods and course delivery practices that have evolved and improved every year.

At the heart of my teaching is my faculty web site and online course web pages. I teach web design, therefore the web is my medium of course delivery and the design of all courses are customized to embrace web design principles, practices, and technologies for the method of delivery of all course content to achieve one goal: increase student learning. Well-designed interfaces lead to better experiences for users. This is the heart and soul of usability and human-centered design.

In this section, I’d like to highlight a few specific teaching methodologies, lesson formats, and course delivery practices that I developed over the past couple of years:

• Teaching Concepts, Not Technology • My Faculty Web Site & Course Web Pages • New Blog-Style Lessons • Video Lessons • The Five D-D-D-D-D’s • The Three S-S-S’s • The Three I-I-I’s

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Teaching Concepts, Not Technology Shifting the Focus Away from Software

Early in my teaching career, I made the mistake that many young teachers make in my discipline, allowing software techniques to sometimes be confused with course concepts.

The NMA program is a Career and Technical Education (CTE) program that aims to best prepare students to enter the local workforce. Each NMA course requires specialized use of different software applications and technologies. The choice of software is typically determined by the industry standards set by companies and designers working in the field. Over the years, I have learned to place less emphasis on design technologies and more emphasis on core principles and best practices that withstand time and transcend technologies. The goal of this approach is to teach students how to think, not how to use technology. One of the outcomes of this approach is for students to become better self-learners that are more self-reliant after they graduate, capable of using any technology or software, regardless of version or vender, through their knowledge of strong design principles and practices to solve real-world design problems.

For example, in Art 128 Interface Programming 1, I use Adobe Dreamweaver to teach front-end web development using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, mainly because Dreamweaver comes as part of the Adobe Creative Suite of applications and is pre-installed on every computer in every NMA lab. It also makes sense because many NMA interface design students with personal computers already have the Adobe Creative Suite of applications installed. However, in the industry, Dreamweaver is one of many applications used by professional designers and front-end web developers. To illustrate this notion of software independence, I show students other software applications, such as Sublime Text, Brackets, and other free and open-source solutions, and encourage them to use them on their personal computers as alternatives. This reinforces to students that they are not learning software in my class, they are learning web design and web development concepts and practices.

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Furthermore, when I teach the new web technologies, I often times remind them that I am teaching technology-independent practices, not specific web technologies or languages. For example, it doesn’t matter if we are using HTML 4.2 or XHTML 1.0 or HTML5, because I am teaching the concept of markup, which applies to all of these technologies. Across all of these technologies, I am teaching how to write well formed, semantic, and accessible markup. The same goes for other technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript. When I teach CSS to implement graphical user interface (UI) elements to their coded projects, I try to emphasize that I am teaching the concept of styling. When adding functionality to their interfaces, I try to stress the importance of learning the fundamentals of language-independent computer programming, using JavaScript as a means to teach the concept of scripting.

Another example is in Art 257 Motion Graphic Design and Art 222 Digital Multimedia, where I use Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Audition to teach video production, video editing, animation, and sound design. Each and every lesson, exercise, and project is custom designed to focus on the key concepts, not the software technologies. Adobe Premiere is one of many non-linear video editing software packages used in the industry, so instead of focusing on the specific software features, I try to place more emphasize on the core elements and principles of filmmaking, such as the scene composition, mise en scène, pacing, transitions, and montage theory. For motion graphics techniques and practices, I remind students that the goal is not to learn Adobe After Effects, but to learn the basic principles of animation, such as squash and stretch, exaggeration, easing, anticipation, and timing.

By shifting the focus away from the individual technologies toward the fundamental concepts, my overall goal is for students to be able to use a wide range of technologies to build upon and expand their foundation of knowledge and understanding of the basics of strong design and visual communication.

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Faculty Web Site & Course Web Pages The Gateway to All of My Courses

Figure 4: The home page of my faculty web site as seen on multiple devices. My faculty web site is a central resource that contains links to all of my course web pages and content for students

and graduates to reference ay any time, from any device.

All of my classes center on my faculty web site and course web pages. Each class web page contains all information relevant to each course with everything that the students will need throughout the semester, including: course syllabi, assignments, lessons, links to external resources, examples, office hours, and contact information. These web pages act as central gateway for students to visit for all of the latest class information. If students need to review course contents or are absent for any reason, they can visit the web site to see what they missed.

Each class web page is structured so students can quickly and easily access all course information at any time. Every year I try to improve the interface of my course web pages to be more efficient and effective. Over the past decade, I have done four major redesigns, and each semester I make small improvements to the design and presentation of all course material.

For example, my most recent course web pages are designed to provide a cleaner, more accessible interface to decrease cognitive overload. Building upon the previous version’s emphasis on providing a “big picture” course overview of the entire semester to the students, the latest version of my course web pages maintain this overall goal, but with a stream-lined interface that is more clear, less cluttered, and is now responsive for mobile and tablet devices. To achieve this, I redesigned and recoded the site using a combination

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of a content-first and mobile-first strategies to help achieve the primary goal of making the learning experience better for my students, regardless of whether or not they are sitting behind their computers or viewing my course web pages from their tablet or mobile phone.

Faculty Site Updates Over Time

Figure 5: Chris Gargiulo's Site 2007-2008

Figure 6: Chris Gargiulo's Site 2008-2010

Figure 7: Chris Gargiulo's Site 2011-2014

Figure 8: Chris Gargiulo's Site 2014-present

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Course Web Pages Centralized Course Content Online

Figure 9: Example of my ART 249 course web page displayed on multiple devices with different

screen sizes. The layout of each web page is adjusted to the screen size for multiple devices to improve the user experience.

For each course web page, I designed several visualizations as informative references to help for students as they plan out their semester. For example, the top of each course web page includes a “big picture” overview, with custom-designed visual interface elements to clearly communicate the most important aspects of the course. The bulk of the course content is presented within weekly modules and lesson modules. To make class critiques more efficient, I provide links to all student sites and external resources related to each course.

Below is a list of some of the key website features followed by a more detailed illustration and description of each one:

1. The Schedule 2. Grading System 3. Google Course Calendar 4. Weekly Lesson modules

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Figure 10: A long view of the contents of my ART 294 course web with close-up views to highlight

4 key features: 1. The Schedule, 2. Grading System, 3. Google Calendar, and 4. Weekly Modules.

1. The Schedule

2. Grading System

3. Google Calendar

4. Weekly Modules

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The Schedule

A Visual Overview of the Course Structure

Figure 11: The Schedule – A custom designed “big picture” visual representation of the course

over the full semester that highlights the key course phases, the durations of each, and grade

values.

At the top of each course web page, I include an introduction section immediately followed by a visual overview of the course schedule and structure, which is a color-coded, week-by-week representation of the course over time. Designed to be a quick reference tool that provides a “big picture” view of the course, it highlights key phases of the semester to help students see what they will be doing over course of the semester. One of the strengths of this particular visual is how it communicates the duration of each phase, illustrating exactly how much time students will be working within each phase of the semester. This visual aid is an effort to help students anticipate how much time they can plan on allocating for each week of the semester, by visually seeing the duration of each project over time along with each project’s due dates.

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The Grading System

A Visual Breakdown of the Grading System in Percentages

Figure 12: The Grading System – an itemized, percentage based visual representation of the key

course phases, deliverables, associated grade values.

To provide more clarification of the grading system, I include a percentage-based visual breakdown of the course grades to further elaborate on the color-coded course schedule immediately above it (figure 11) that also includes the grade values for each phase and deliverable for each course. Designed to be another quick reference tool for students, it provides an alternate view of the key phases and projects students will work on over the semester, along with their associated point values and percentage toward their final grade.

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Google Course Calendar

A Third Party Scheduling System

Figure 13: Google Course Calendar - a powerful third-party solution as another visual aid to help students plan their semesters and meet all deadlines and due dates.

I include an interactive Google Calendar on each course web site as yet another visual aid to help students plan accordingly for their semester. Google calendars are powerful communication tools for students to quickly and easily use today’s date as a measure to approximate how much time they have before assignments are due. I input all project due dates along with labels for each week (e.g. “Week 1,” “Week 2”), which is especially helpful for students as an updated indicator of the current week throughout the semester.

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Weekly Lesson Modules

The location of all course content and lessons

Figure 14: Weekly Lesson Modules – I use expandable modules to store most of the course content and lessons. Modules are helpful interface solutions to structure and organize all course

content and lessons.

The bulk of each class web page is a series of weekly lesson modules that are presented inside of an interactive “accordion” style system, also known as closable or collapsible panels. Students can click on their desired week and/or lesson to see the detailed materials, lessons, and assignments for that particular lesson or week.

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Figure 15: An expanded view of a weekly lesson module – note the four key content sections: 1. the agenda, 2. the homework example, 3. the presentation (a video lesson), and 4. assignment

instructions.

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Weekly Module Structure

Within each module, I structure the weekly content in such a way that makes it easily understandable. Every year I improve the presentation of the information. For example, in 2011, I added an Agenda section within each weekly module, so students will know exactly what to expect when they come to class each week. Below the Agenda section, I include all lesson-related resources, such as video lessons, links to examples shown in class, and source files for students to download. In 2011, I added a weekly Assignment section, with detailed instructions for exactly which assignment student should be working on that week. For assignments and projects that span multiple weeks, this weekly assignment feature provides detailed instruction for what individual components of the assignment students should be working on. If they missed class for any reason, then can go back and see exactly what they missed and get access to all of the lesson files and resources. Collectively, these accessible online resources help to ensure that no students get left behind.

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Figure 16: Example of a Blog Style Lesson – an online topic-based method of lesson delivery that I

began implementing in the fall of 2013 that has a lot of advantages over other instructional

delivery formats.

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Blog-Style Lessons

A topic-specific lesson delivery format

In the fall of 2013, I made further improvements to the delivery format for the lessons for my courses by creating topic-based web pages for each major lesson, exercise, and project.

I refer to this style of lesson delivery as “blog-style” lessons, where the entire lesson, including all content, reference files, examples, and video lessons – are stored on one web page as a one-stop centralized location for each lesson, project, and class exercise. There are many benefits to this approach. For example, in previous years (2011-2013), I used to post each lesson on individual course web pages under the weekly module that that lesson was offered. While this was an improvement from previous years, it was not ideal for several reasons, such as: 1) If a student needed to go back and reference a particular project, or lesson, or exercise from a previous year’s course, he or she would have to first go to that old course web page and then figure out which week it was offered in order to locate the lesson within the weekly module. If I taught the same lesson every year, or even a similar lesson in a different course, which often times happens, I used to create duplicate lessons for each and every course web page for every year and semester, which resulted in multiple copies of the same lesson.

Furthermore, every time I teach a lesson, I make improvements via subtle changes, which means that prior instances of that same lesson may be dated. To resolve this, my new blog-style lessons each exist as a single, separate, course-independent lesson, which I now refer to as topic-specific blog posts. These new topic-specific posts can be accessible in many ways (i.e. linked to from any course), are much easier to find, and are more up-to-date, since there is only one version of each one. I even added a Blog page to my web site to make these more accessible. Finally, whenever I update a lesson or project, I now can do it in one place, so everyone always sees the latest version.

These ongoing changes to my course web pages make important course content more accessible to the students by omitting several unnecessary steps. They also act as applied pedagogical examples that reinforce the core web design principles that I teach in all of my courses, where the primary goal is to increase usability by creating better user interfaces that embrace user-centered design practices.

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Video Lessons

My most effective method of online lesson delivery

One of the most effective teaching tools that I employed is the use of online video lessons. They have helped to improve the way I teach and how my students learn.

Video lessons are video files that teachers can create by recording their computer screen and their voice using a microphone and screen capture software. The result is a step-by-step visual and audio demonstration where viewers can follow all mouse movements and on-screen actions while listening to the teacher’s instruction. The best part is that video lessons can be compressed and posted on-line for students to view from home on their own time.

When I am teaching in the classroom many of my lessons are done on a big screen via projector, where I demonstrate specific visual techniques using graphical software. Even after multiple repeated demonstrations, students often request additional time for repeated instruction on complex techniques. By utilizing online video lessons, students are now able to learn and review the material at their own pace, supporting independent problem solving and thereby freeing up more in-class time and office hours for additional learning opportunities.

Video lessons are a form of differentiated instruction with many beneficial attributes for both students and teachers. For students, they are able to view lessons at any time and from anywhere: home or school. If they forget how to do something, or if they miss class, they can always go to the class web site, download the video lesson, and catch up on past lessons. For teachers, it is not only a time-saving resource for avoiding repeated lessons and demonstrations, but also a useful preparatory tool helping teachers to plan accordingly by rehearsing lessons prior to class. I often found that after going through the production process of planning and recording my video lessons I was better prepared to communicate my lectures come class time, similar to how a well prepared actor is better able to perform on stage after many dress rehearsals.

Since I began creating video lessons in 2006, I have created a total of 145 video lessons. During the past five years, I created 59 video lessons.

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Figure 17: Example Video Lesson - from ART 257 Motion Graphic Design, this video lesson introduces students to the basic principles of animation using Adobe After Effects.

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The Five D-D-D-D-D’s

My Design Process

Over the years I have made minor revisions to improve a general 5-step design process for web design that I teach in almost all of my classes. Originally from Brink, Gergle, and Wood’s 2001 Pervasive Usability Process5, my modifications are a combination of nomenclature changes and content updates that attempt to make the entire process, and each step, more memorable for the students to remember and for me to repeat in class.

Below is the latest version of my five-step design process:

1. Define

Define the project, problem(s), and stakeholder's primary goals via the project brief. Gather background info to define user profiles, goals, and tasks.

2. Draft

Brainstorm conceptual solutions; draft the information architecture, site maps, wireframes, prototypes, content hierarchy, and structure.

3. Design

Visualize and communicate the user interface design via mood boards, type studies, color studies, prototypes, iterative mockups, and multiple rounds of refinements.

4. Develop

Build the interactive, fully functioning product using web standard compliant, accessible, valid, semantic markup, styling, and scripting.

5. Diligence

Via due diligence, fix all bugs and conduct multiple tests for quality assurance across multiple platforms, browsers, devices, and screen-sizes.

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The Three S-S-S’s

My Teaching Delivery Methodology

Most of my in-class lessons are delivered via projector, where my computer screen is projected onto the big screen for all of my students to see while they sit behind their own computers and follow along with the lesson. This setup works best when I need to do hands-on demonstrations to teach technical design practices and techniques that require a series of steps using complex technologies. The challenge for technical lessons like these is three-fold:

A. How can I get the students engaged and excited to learn the lesson? B. How can I prevent students from falling behind? C. How can I ensure that the students absorbed the material?

Over the years I developed a three-step teaching delivery process that attempts to solve the above problems in the most time-efficient and effective manner, all of which center around custom designed in-class exercises created for each lesson. Each exercise is thought out with clearly stated outcomes and instructions, and each year I make enhancements and changes to improve each exercise based upon the successes and failures from past years.

For the method of delivery for each lesson and exercise, I first tried using a two-step “Watch it and Walk it” approach, where I began each lesson by encouraging students to 1) “watch” me compete the full lesson on the big screen, then 2) I would “walk” around the room and help each student behind their individual computers. This worked well for short and simple exercises that could be completed in a half hour or less, but most of my lessons are more complex and require more time to complete, so I expanded upon this with a more comprehensive three-step lesson delivery system.

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Below are the steps of my three S-S-S approach:

1. "Show" It

Each technical lesson begins with a quick on-screen demo, where I visually show the students what they will be learning. As a brief overview, this first step is designed to introduce the primary topics and summarize the complete process.

2. "Step" It

After showing the demo, I walk through each step of the in-class exercise, slowly step-by-step. Answering questions along the way, this second step is designed to cover all of the details of the lesson in a hands-on format, with ample time for students to absorb the material.

3. "Support" It

After showing the lesson and stepping through it, my last step is to support the students as they apply the lesson via a course project or homework assignment. This third and final step is designed to increase student learning through application and repetition.

Combined, this three-step process has worked well in practice. The first step, where I quickly “show” the lesson on-screen as a visual demonstration, has been helpful to address student engagement. I often start by showing examples that visually illustrate the concepts from the lesson in an applied context. Well chosen examples, such as web sites from influential design agencies and past student projects, help to get the students excited to learn the lesson because a) students can quickly see how the concepts from the lesson can be applied in real-world examples and b) they act as a motivational sources of inspiration, especially when they see how past students have succeeded in applying the lesson in the context of past student projects. I then give an overview of the lesson to highlight the key topics and concepts that the in-class exercise will be addressing.

The second step, where I slowly go through the full exercise step-by-step along with the students, helps to ensure that everyone absorbs the material in full and prevents students from falling behind. I wait for every student to complete each step before moving on to the next step. This phase allows for me to have more time to go into greater depth and detail for each individual concept. It also provides the opportunity for me to answer questions that students have and help to resolve any technical problems that they may run into. To ensure that no student is falling behind, I walk around the room and visit each student’s computer station to make sure that everyone is keeping up. This provides feedback for me mid-lesson, to adjust the pace of each class accordingly.

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The third step, where I support students one-on-one as they apply what they have learned in the context of a homework assignment or class project, is perhaps the most important step to ensure student learning. This provides an opportunity for students to enhance their own projects as they try to apply the lessons learned to solve their individual design problems in their individual projects. To encourage independence, all assignments and projects are designed to allow for individual creative freedom so students can make their own interpretations and means of expression. To support students, I meet with students one-on-one during in-class working periods and office hours as they incorporate multiple lessons into their large-scale projects and build upon them week-by-week.

Time Considerations

Time-wise, this three-step approach is sometimes impossible to complete during a limited two and a half hour class meeting. When I first starting implementing this three-step process, I occasionally ran out of time in class, especially when a lesson was so complex that it required me to slow down the pace of the in-class delivery of the lesson. To address this challenge, I try to make video lessons of each and every lesson, so that even if we run out of time in class, students can still get access to the full lesson by watching the video online as homework.

Improvements

Over the years, I have fine-tuned each lesson and exercise and continue to do so every year. I also implemented a series of helpful strategies to increase the efficiency of each lesson, such as by providing pre-setup exercise files on my course web pages (e.g. zip files) that can be quickly and easily downloaded and opened up in-class on their computers before each lesson. I also began posting lesson resources and materials in a variety of formats to increase accessibility, such as posting code samples on Codepen, a third-party code sharing web site, and posting print-friendly pdf versions for those students that prefer to print out lessons in an analog format that they can hold with their hands, highlight, and use to make notes. Collectively, all of my teaching strategies, methodologies, and combined forms of instructional delivery are designed to reinforce the concepts from each course and lesson through clarity and repetition, increase student absorption and retention, and make learning easier and more fun by being more a more effective and efficient teacher.

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The Three I-I-I’s

My Self-Learning Process

One of my goals as a teacher is to empower students to become independent self-learners. Web design is a technical field with industry practices, technologies, and techniques that change rapidly. One of the unique challenge that teachers face in my field, is how can we teach young students and aspiring designers how to teach themselves, especially when it involves new and emergent cutting-edge technologies? Often times, students come to me and ask how they can learn a new technology or technique that is not covered in any of the current NMA courses? For example, many students want to push the limits of their front-end web development skills and improve their projects by using third-party JavaScript solutions that they find online. Often times they get excited about some cool new feature or technology and want to learn how to do it. Sometimes, it is so new that I have yet to learn it myself. As a teacher, I love when this happens and embrace these situations as self-learning opportunities, for both students and teacher alike.

To begin to guide them, I recently began teaching an inquiry-based three-step approach to self-learning that I call the three I-I-I’s:

1. Investigate

Identify the problem that needs to be solved and search for solutions.

2. Isolate

Isolate each solution before comparing and measuring the results.

3. Integrate

Integrate the best solution by applying it in context.

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This three-step approach is specifically catered for web design students that are faced with trying to figure out how and if they should be learning or using a new design pattern, technique, or technology. In most situations, students approach me while working on a current project, so it makes sense that my teaching approach should be aligned with project-based learning, or more specifically inquiry based learning. To start the dialogue, I try to ask each student, “Why?” This simple question acts as a catalyst to the first step of the process of investigation. Some students tend to get ahead of themselves too early, by looking for solutions before identifying their design problems. Alternately, some students do not have a problem and simply want to do something new. Once the design problem is defined, the self-learning process can properly move forward by searching for not one, but multiple solutions. This first step of investigation and exploration is an example of how I try to teach them self-learning by asking them to gather knowledge. I may point the student in the general direction and make suggestions, but I do not provide the solutions. They need to do this on their own.

Once several solutions have been identified, I then ask the student to isolate each and run a series of tests to find out their strengths and weaknesses. Too often do I see students skip this step, by attempting to apply their found potential solutions directly to their current projects, without properly analyzing each potential solution in isolation. This second step helps to encourage students to be more critical and comprehensive when making design designs. Once they have compared and measured each solution, I encourage them to apply it in context by integrating it into their projects. The best part about this approach is that at the end of the process, after they have successfully investigated, isolated, and integrated a found solution, there is sometimes an “aha” moment, when they reflect upon the process and realize that they did it all on their own. I did not provide the solution for them and I did not teach them anything. They taught themselves using the critical thinking and self-directed learning skills emphasized throughout each of my courses.

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Courses Taught

Over the past five years, I have taught a total of nine different classes at KCC, as outlined below.

1. ART 128 Interface Programming 1 2. ART 155 Information Architecture 3. ART 222 Digital Multimedia 4. ART 249 Interface Design 2 5. ART 257 Motion Graphic Design 6. ART 258 Interface Programming 2 7. ART 285 Interface Design Studio 8. ART 293 NMA Internship 9. ART 299 Independent Study

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ART 128 Interface Programming 1

Intro to Front-end Web Development

Interface Programming 1 introduces HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Students learn how to take static designs from Photoshop and convert them into coded interactive web sites using well formed, web standard compliant markup and styling.

The predominant underlying markup technology behind the web is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Together with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, HTML web sites can be powerful, flexible, usable, accessible, and beautiful. This class is catered toward visual web designers who need to be able to convert visually creative designs into interactive working web

sites. During the first few weeks of the semester we learn the basics of markup (HTML), styling (CSS), and scripting (JavaScript). During the remaining weeks of the semester, we take an existing design from Photoshop and use it to go through the final stages of the design process for interface design of building and testing a HTML web site.

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ART 155 Information Architecture

Intro to User Experience Design

Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience Design (UX) embrace important User-Centered-Design (UCD) principles to help improve the usability of all interactive systems. IA and UX consist of multiple exercises to help designers to get to know their users and design the best possible interfaces for them. Methodologies and practices include defining user profiles, goals, and tasks and employing approaches such as content-first.

Information Architecture is the study of the organization and presentation of content for interactive web sites. Students learn how to structure complex information systems; to set meaningful

usability goals; to define navigational menus that site visitors will immediately understand; and to design a site to meet the needs of target audiences.

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ART 222 Digital Multimedia

Intro to Video Production

Digital Multimedia introduces digital video editing and motion graphics design for film, television, and the web. The full production process for time-based media is explored using Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Audition, and Encore.

Multimedia can be defined as image plus text plus sound. Today's designers often need to integrate video and advanced motion graphics into web projects requiring a foundation in the production process for time-based works of digital multimedia. This class provides studio experience in multimedia concepts and techniques through the creation of time-based works of art. Early in the semester students learn the basics of video

production using digital camcorders, video editing using Adobe Premiere, sound design using Adobe Audition, intermediate motion graphic design using Adobe After Effects, and DVD authoring using Adobe Encore. During the second half of the semester, students go through the full creative process of pre-production, production, and post-production creating a time-based work of digital multimedia.

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ART 249 Interface Design 2

The Full Web Design Process

Interface Design 2 covers the full creative design process for interaction design of researching, planning, designing, coding, and testing a custom web standard compliant HTML/CSS web site for a chosen client and target audience.

Quality web sites that meet both client and user needs can be successfully created when designers properly go through the full creative design process. Integral to this process are the deliverables and documentation used in the industry for client based projects that help to ensure that the final product meets all of the primary project goals and objectives. In this class students plan, design, and code one HTML web site over the course of the semester. During the first few weeks of the

semester students choose a client, research the industry, and define the information architecture of their chosen site by drafting the necessary conceptual planning documentation such as site maps and wireframes. Later in the semester, students go through multiple rounds of design revisions until a mockup is created that best suits the project demands. During the final weeks of the semester, students code and test the web site across platforms, devices, and browsers for quality assurance.

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ART 257 Motion Graphic Design

Design in Motion

Motion Graphic Design introduces motion graphic design to add the element of time to basic graphic design principles. Students learn the basics of 2D animation techniques, story structure, and filmmaking primarily for web-based applications.

Motion Graphic Design is a broad field that includes motion graphics for film, television, and the web. In its most basic form, it is graphic design with the addition of time and audio. Depending upon the medium, context, and style, the technologies for motion graphics production vary. As mediums converge and technologies evolve, the means may change, but the underlying principles of animation and motion graphics remain the same. In this class we learn the basics of motion graphic design by creating animations for the web using

primarily Adobe After Effects. To start, we explore core animation principles such as squash and stretch, timing, and easing (slow in/out). Topics and assignments range from kinetic typography (type in motion), to commercial interstitials, promotions, and advertisements. Techniques range from basic keyframe animation to advanced masking. During the second half of the semester, we go through the full design process of planning, designing, and animating one large-scale motion graphics piece.

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ART 258 Interface Programming 2

Intermediate Front-end Web Development

Interface Programming 2 builds upon foundation level HTML, CSS, and JavaScript concepts to develop intermediate skills in front-end interface programming. Weekly topics address emerging and popular techniques and technologies.

Front-end web technologies, techniques, and practices change rapidly, driven by an international community of web designers and developers, new software and hardware solutions, and a wide range of new devices with an increasingly wide range of screen sizes, features, and functionality. To keep up with the many changes within this dynamic field, UX/UI designers and front-end web developers are constantly re-examining best practices to solve new problems with new markup, styling, and scripting technologies. Through lessons,

demonstrations, and hands-on-exercise, this course aims to embrace strong design fundamentals, web standards, progressive enhancement, and user-centered design principles to examine some of the challenges faced by today's front-end web developers. Through a selected set of contemporary topics designed to address emerging and popular interface programming techniques and technologies, students design and code a series of projects using different technologies to create effective, user-friendly interfaces.

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ART 285 Interface Design Studio

Interface Design Exploration

Interface Design Studio provides studio experience for students to work on large-scale interface design projects by going in depth into the full design process. Students can work individually or collaboratively to explore an interface design project of their choice.

Interface Design is a broad field that builds upon a foundation in fine art and graphic design and overlaps with multiple domains such as communications, computer science, art, and human-computer-interaction. This class is an opportunity for students to go in depth into a chosen area of focus by utilizing the studio model of learning in a curricular environment structured by the creative process for interface design.

One of the limitations of any digital media curriculum is impossibility to offer courses that comprehensively cover all facets of a dynamic field that is driven by an actively growing industry that changes rapidly. So many new technologies and techniques are being developed at alarming rates, that it

creates a difficult challenge for both students and educators. This course is designed to address this problem on a curricular level by providing an opportunity for students with varying interests to choose one semester-long project that best suits their individual goals and style of self-learning. Individual (and group) projects may take several different forms, such as creating a custom designed web site using a content management system, or creating a responsive web site designed to adapt to multiple screen sizes, or an app for a mobile device, or a video that uses advanced motion graphics, or a fine art gallery installation, or an advertising campaign that spans multiple media.

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ART 293 NMA Internship

Real-World Experience

This NMA Internship course is designed to provide real-world, supervised work experience with mentorship by a professional in the field, enabling students to apply the knowledge and skills acquired in the classroom to the work environment.

Internships are invaluable. Students get real world experience and exposure to the local industry and local companies get to work closely with NMA students and consider them as potential future hires. Ideal internships consist of a professional environment with creative projects with guided mentorship. Students are expected to be mature, reliable, strong communicators, and good team players. Several NMA internships have turned into full-time job offers.

List of internship placements from last year:

Fall 2013

• KCC Web Team • Eric Woo Design • Clarence Lee • Ikayzo • Nella Media Group • Design Asylum • MVNP • Super Fine Design • Image Creations Hawaii

Spring 2014

• KCC Web Team • Eric Woo Design • Clarence Lee • Ikayzo • Nella Media Group • Design Asylum • Super Fine Design

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ART 299 Independent Study

During the 2013-2014 academic year I did three ART 299 Independent study courses, one in the fall and two in this spring.

I met with students on a regular basis as they worked on their individual projects. One student researched content management systems for a documentary film web site and front-end frameworks for a teaching web site. Another student created a documentary-style informational NMA video that will be

used for NMA promotional purposes. Independent studies are an invaluable way to spend more time bonding with students as they pursue their studies. They are also great learning opportunities for both the students and teacher.

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Teaching Assessment

One of the biggest challenges in teaching NMA courses is determining how to best measure student learning and performance when all courses are studio art classes with the majority of assignments being visual art projects.

As previously discussed, I predominately employ the use of studio art critiques as the means by which students present their work and demonstrate their communication skills and understanding of the course topics. Studio art critiques consist of one student displaying his or her work in front of the entire class while speaking about it and defending it as the rest of the students and the teacher ask questions and make comments. This is a popular practice within academic art disciplines and is well suited for NMA students, because often times in the industry designers must present their work to clients and be able to speak about their work intelligently, communicate their intentions, and defend their design decisions.

Grading Sheets

The challenge arises when it comes to figuring out the grade for each project. When I first began teaching, I utilized the grading strategies of a few teachers that taught these courses before me. A former instructor shared with me a series of grading sheets that I adapted for each of my courses. Every year, I struggled to adjust each grading sheet to fit each class project. Some projects were more abstract, being more conceptual and less technical, while others had very clear, measurable outcomes (e.g. does the HTML and CSS code validate? Are there errors with the code?). I discovered that the grading sheets were helpful guides, but they failed to address the full range of the design process and the depth of complexity of each assignment. I discovered that many students were getting higher grades than they actually deserved. This had little to do with the weighting system, but more with the limitations of the grading sheet system that I had been using.

Grading Rubrics

I first started using grading rubrics during the practice of post-critique self-evaluations, where I asked students to grade themselves after their presentations. I used to draw a simplified rubric on the board and ask students to measure their work based upon the parameters of the project. The results were fascinating: most students gave themselves lower grades than they had previously expected, which ultimately was a more accurate

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reflection of the quality of their work and more aligned with the more critical feedback that they may receive in the industry.

To improve upon this system of evaluation, I drafted a series of rubrics that were more detailed and comprehensive. The results were immediately clear and more accurate. For each rubric, I used a likert scale that measures whether a student’s work “fails to meet expectations,” ”meets the minimal expectations,” “meets expectations,” or “exceeds expectations.” This framework enables me to provide a more accurate and fair evaluation of student work. The additional practice of including the students on the process via self-evaluation helps to improve student’s understanding of both the grade and the individual concepts that are being graded.

Over the years, I had several conversations on the topic with my colleagues, Emily Moody and Ailed Garcia. Both use custom designed grading sheet and rubric designed to fit each of their courses and on some occasion’s individual projects. After taking a look at their systems, I implemented a category-based grouping model that I later adapted to become the system that I presently use. The categories are:

1. The Design Process 2. Conceptual Design 3. Visual Execution 4. Technical Execution 5. Synthesis & Presentation

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Figure 18: Grading sheet designed to work

with the accompanying rubric on the right.

Figure 19: Grading rubric as a self-evaluation

tool, where students evaluate their own work.

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Coordinating

NMA Discipline Coordinator

I am currently the program coordinator, responsible for handling all program-related administrative duties. I take great pride in being the spokesperson for our program.

In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I served as NMA coordinator for the four of the past five years, managing an A.S. degree program of sixty plus students, three computer labs/classrooms, twenty seven NMA courses, and a team of ten plus instructional faculty, counselors, lab managers and student lab monitors.

As NMA coordinator, I led all program-level administrative initiatives such as drafting strategic plans, annual budgeting and technology planning, securing funding through various grants, faculty and staff hiring, curriculum development, establishment of new teaching methodologies, and drafting and implementation of new assessment practices.

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Core NMA Coordinator Responsibilities:

• Grant writing & reporting to secure external funding for three computer labs/classrooms.

• Drafting program strategic plans, tactical plans, and by-laws to align with campus goals and for future technology planning.

• Overseeing lab managers and student lab monitors.

• Hiring of all faculty, lecturers, and staff.

• Scheduling of all semester courses and classrooms.

• Analyzing enrollment data and writing comprehensive program reviews and reports.

• Organizing annual admissions and portfolio reviews for new student applicants.

• Organizing Advisory Board meetings with local industry representatives.

• Working with UH-system wide digital media faculty to align courses and draft articulation agreements.

• Organizing community outreach presentations to promote the program to local schools and young prospective students.

• Networking with local companies and organizations on various collaborative projects and to facilitate the hiring of our graduates.

• Organizing and facilitating student art shows.

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The NMA program is a highly specialized program that requires diligent oversight by the NMA coordinator.

Three Computer Labs

NMA has three computer labs that require monitoring and specialized equipment upgrades. We have a full time lab manager and an annual budget for equipment, software, and payroll for student workers to monitor the open lab periods for students. As coordinator, I am responsible for overseeing our full-time lab manager to make sure that the budget is spent wisely, equipment is well maintained, and all open labs are run properly.

Monthly Meetings

Due to the ambitious nature of our program, NMA faculty meet once a month to discuss our many projects and endeavors. As coordinator, I schedule, organize, and facilitate the monthly meetings, write up agendas, take meeting minutes, and share this information with all NMA faculty (please see a sample of my NMA meeting minutes in the Primary Duties section of the appendix). I also maintain and organize all NMA digital documentation via a Laulima work site that I created and a shared Google Drive folder. I developed these online repositories so all NMA faculty can have access to NMA related documentation and contribute to it on a continual basis.

Managing Funds and External Grants

One of the most important responsibilities of the NMA coordinator is overseeing sources of funding. Over the past five years, I managed several grants and written several grant reports. For example, in 2011, we received a large amount of funding from Title III for equipment and renovations to one of our NMA labs. I oversaw the entire project, from planning to scheduling, and led all meetings. I worked with NMA Lab Manager Joe Mahi on the budget and temporary classroom changes during construction. We met all deadlines and the project was a success.

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Select Admissions

NMA is a select admissions program where prospective students submit a portfolio for review before being admitted. Every year the NMA coordinator must organize this event along with the NMA counselor.

Scheduling

Every semester the NMA coordinator is responsible for developing the course schedule, carefully balancing the schedules for our four full time faculty and approximately six lecturers per year.

Student Shows

At the end of each academic year, we host a student show for graduating students. The NMA coordinator is responsible for organizing this show by sending invites, ordering food, and giving a welcome speech at the event.

Solving Problems as NMA Coordinator

I often times kid around that the title of the NMA coordinator should be more accurately renamed to NMA “fire chief” because such a large part of the job is putting out fires. Whenever a NMA student has a problem or conflict, such as issues with the curriculum, their peers, or with their instructors, the NMA counselor and NMA coordinator are typically the first responders. Some situations require more time than others, depending upon their seriousness.

Over the past five years, we’ve had several challenging and time-consuming fires to put out. For example, I once had to work with my department chair to assess whether or not a new lecturer’s behavior was sexually inappropriate. Twice in one year, I had to assess whether or not a disruptive student violated the student conduct code. One year, I had to address two separate incidents of plagiarism at the same time. Two of the most challenging incidents involved fielding student complaints of two poorly performing lecturers. None of these experiences were rewarding. I lost many hours of my life analyzing the student conduct code, writing emails, and meeting with students, faculty, admin, and the NMA counselor to make sure that we address these situations properly.

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Typical Coordinator Responsibilities

• Primary contact person (respond to emails, attend meetings, help orient and mentor new faculty)

• Organize Program meetings (agenda, invites, minutes) • Scheduling (fall & spring) • Hiring (recruit, organize and conduct interviews for

lecturers) • Program Review (ARPD/Health Indicator Report) • A.S. Degree & Curriculum Updates (ARM/PARs, NMA

Course Offerings, Semester Groupings, Course Outlines)

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NMA-Specific Coordinator Responsibilities:

• Oversee Lab Manager and all hardware, software, and equipment budgets

• Facilitate Annual NMA Admissions • Organize annual portfolio review process. • Update procedures and admissions documentation

• Organize NMA student gallery shows and entries • Attend local tech fairs and conferences to promote the

program • Organize NMA information sessions both on and off-

campus. • Manage all program content and documentation to ensure

accessible to all faculty. • Plan and organize the end-of-the-year NMA student show,

where 100 plus industry professionals come to see the work of the graduating NMA students

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Evaluations

Figure 20: My total average of student evaluation scores was 4.79

out of 5, from 2009-2014 across all courses and evaluation questions.

Student Evaluations

Every semester I carefully read and reflect upon my student evaluations. I take them very seriously and value the input from my students. After accumulating all student evaluation data over the past five years, I ended up with an overall score of 4.79 out of a possible total of 5.

At the end of each semester, students at KCC are given the opportunity to provide an evaluation of the teacher’s performance via a student evaluation form. The student evaluations forms are comprised of a series of questions, all of which are designed to reflect a teacher’s performance across a variety of factors.

All numbers presented here were calculated using student evaluation data from 2009-2014. I used Microsoft Excel to gather all data and generate visual charts. After analyzing the data, I discovered that my numbers average between 4.65 and 5 across all evaluation questions, courses, and years. I feel that this is a good indication that I am doing something right as a teacher.

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Average student evaluations scores per year:

Average student evaluations scores per course:

Average student evaluations scores per evaluation question:

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Student Comments

I carefully review the students’ written remarks for each open-ended question and take them very seriously. Each comment provides a more detailed and personal voice from each student and plays a large role in my motivation to become a better teacher.

Each student evaluation form includes a series of questions and an area for open-ended responses. I have included hard copies of all written responses from all students in all of my classes in the Primary Duties section of the appendix. I have selected a few that I would like to highlight below.

Notable Positive Remarks:

“Chris makes himself available by having more than the standard once a week office hours. He does extended, all-day office hours as well as makes available video lessons he records on his own time, and resources and inspirational bits

that he has collected.”

– Spring 2014 ART 128 Student

“Chris is extremely passionate about the subject matter and is wildly enthusiastic when teaching it. He cares very much for the individual successes and

overcoming of milestones for each individual student and spends one on one time during class to make sure we stay on track.”

– Fall 2013 ART 257 Student

“Love the studio course. It lets me design/create like I have done before. Explore new ideas. This course has definitely pushed my buttons of what I'm capable of

doing.”

– Spring 2013 ART 285 Student

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“Chris' expertise on the subject matter is one of many of his major strengths. He balances the technical part with the design part very well and always has

constructive suggestions for projects. Even though this class deals with a wide range of project material, Chris' knowledge is evident in helping each student

improve their work. Chris makes sure that everyone in class understands what's due and what is expected for assignments or presentations. He also is fair about allotting time for each student in presentations, problems, etc. He's also available

via email and office hours to help with projects. He communicates very well on what is expected to be successful in class.”

– Spring 2013 ART 285 Student

“On his class website, he has well organized resources that he has to cover during the semester, the video clips for students to learn, the appropriate small exercises that pin-points what students need to understand with minimum time and precision. His lectures are energetic and entertaining quality; his one-to-one sessions during the studio work time, he works like a first-class consultant giving

an advice to a client not for a student.”

– Spring 2013 ART 128 Student

“Within 5-6 weeks, I learned how to code a website and now say its easy to code. The transformation feeling is indescribable.”

– Spring 2012 ART 128 Student

“Chris is a great human being - kind and considerate. Very approachable and easy to talk too. Not afraid to admit to mistakes. When he encounters a problem, he will figure it out in front of the class, rather than moving on - this is very helpful,

it shows us what we can do when we don’t have someone babysitting us.”

– Spring 2012 ART 222 Student

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“Christoper Gargulio is passionate, brilliantly organized, and current in the field, inspiring, a great listener and empowering. He starts the class with inspiration

session that includes a library of NMA site, works, document he shares with the class. His filing convention demonstrated his ability to use all his resources to

demonstrate clear procedures that inspires the entire class. He values all input for the class and researches any ideas might enhance a students project. He teaches us how to become independent thinkers and researchers in an atmosphere that

encourages us to carry his example to our fellow students. I have had many instructors but few instructors that posses the passion Chris fuels my creativity. He is not only a great communicator he is so positive that his energy carries me over the bumpy learning curve for his winning smile. He seems to make time for

everyone with full concern to keeping us inspired.”

– Fall 2011 ART 258 Student

“He is the only teacher that has made me this motivated. It's like every project in his class are made really well in mind to help the student. I think that his class was

the best I've ever had. When I didn't finish a project it was like I was letting him personally down. Because he really is a wonderful teacher and person.”

– Fall 2010 ART 249 Student

“Chris even goes the extra-mile, being available for all students during his office hours. I personally witnessed his helpfulness on a couple occasions when he stayed past 8:00pm! And that shows his commitment to my/our success!”

– Spring 2010 ART 155 Student

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Notable Critical Remarks:

“Possibly finding the time to answer emails and more time on the final.”

– Spring 2014 ART 128 Student

“Check Email more often.”

– Fall 2013 ART 293 Student

“More time for the final project. I feel like the class got held up in the beginning learning the basics, not everyone was able to grasp it at the same speed and as a

class I felt we spent too much time in the intro and were a little pressed for time while executing the final project.”

– Fall 2013 ART 257 Student

“Sometimes he talks too much about unrelated things but its not terrible.”

– Fall 2012 ART 285 Student

“The only suggestion that I could give to Chris is - be more selfish. Learn to take it easy so that you don't burn out and damage your health. Be around for your boys and wife. Your students are important, but they pale in comparison to your family

and ultimately, you.”

– Spring 2013 ART 285 Student

“Sometimes, Chris' unbound enthusiasm can be his downfall. He is the sort of person that will put men on Mars, with his imagination and boundless energy.

However, for the rest of us, earth-bound, his abstract solutions and ideas are not necessarily applicable in the real world situations. We would have to be futuristic

androids in order to live up to his fanciful digressions and expectations.”

– Fall 2012 ART 293 Student

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Peer Evaluations

I value feedback and advice from my peers. Every year I reflect upon each comment and try to improve my teaching and coordinating.

Over the past five years, I was evaluated twice by my immediate peers, Ailed Garcia and Emily Moody. As my closest colleagues, I highly value their feedback. They both teach within the interface design program with me and we often share the same students. Together, the three of us have taken the responsibility of the interface design program, the curriculum, and the students. We are always brainstorming, sharing ideas, and discussing ways to improve all aspects of our teaching. I have included a copy of their peer evaluations in the Primary Duties section of the appendix. Below are a few notable comments that I would like to share.

“Chris spearheaded the program’s 5 Year Update effort. All 27 NMA active courses were updated. Alongside his peers, Chris helped to strategically develop a “competency” system that aligned well with program SLO’s

(making the assessment process easier in the future). Chris worked tirelessly on this effort, and aside from the 14 course updates he completed himself, he coordinated Curriculum marathon meetings to aide fellow faculty in the

completion of all outstanding 5-year updates.”

– Ailed Garcia

“Chris plays an integral role in the operations and success of the New Media Arts Program and is an incredible asset to all those who are lucky

enough to work with or study under him.”

– Emily Moody

“Chris successfully managed the Title III grant award ($700K+) for the renovations of the NMA labs and new equipment. He oversaw the entire project from

planning, budgeting, to scheduling and leading all meetings.“

– Ailed Garcia

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“Chris has created visually stunning websites that deliver clear and succinct content for the students to utilize throughout the semester.“

– Emily Moody

“Chris Gargiulo has clearly evidenced his ongoing commitment to the New Media Arts program. His effective, practical, and current teaching methods, have been instrumental in ensuring graduates from our program are workforce-ready. The

industry changes with stunning rapidity and Chris has done a commendable job of maintaining those crucial linkages. His coordination of the program has been key to

creating productive relationships with local multimedia firms. Organizing the meetings and communicating with a diverse group of professionals and academicians is a

challenging undertaking; Chris has handled the aforementioned with skill and persistence.”

– Ailed Garcia

“I admire the manner in which Chris interacts with students; he is approachable, enthusiastic, and inspiring. His nature is such that the students are at ease in the

classroom while discussing and defending their work.“

– Emily Moody

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Figure 21: My colleague Emily Moody presenting at the AIGA Design Week 2013

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PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Over the past five years, I have worked to stay up-to-date through a variety of professional development activities, such as attending conferences, talks, and workshops, and by a series of self-learning initiatives, such as watching online videos and reading various industry relevant books, articles, magazines, and blogs.

Conferences, Talks, & Events

By attending national and local conferences, along with talks, lectures, and workshops, I stay current in both my academic discipline and the local industry.

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Self-learning & Designing

By reading books, articles, tutorials, blogs, and videos, I learn new technologies and apply them through my personal artwork and design projects.

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Conferences, Talks, & Events

By attending national and local conferences, along with talks, lectures, and workshops, I stay current in both my academic discipline and the local industry.

New Media changes with alarming rapidity, driven by the industry and the rapid changes in technologies and techniques. The field of web design can transform itself in a matter of months. To try to keep abreast of new developments both nationally and locally, I try to attend as many conferences, talks, workshops, and events as possible.

Conferences Over the past five years, I attended eight conferences, including three national conferences and five local conferences.

CSS Dev Conference 2012 This conference was awesome! I got to see Jessica Hische talk about typography and meet my idol: Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com. My students off kid me because I love Chris Coyier (I refer to his web site all the time in class), so to see him in person was a treat, along with other industry heavyweights like Brad Frost, who gave a talk on responsive navigation patterns. Rarely do big industry conferences come to Hawaii, so when this one came I was not going to miss it.

InControl Conference 2012 This conference was paired with the CSS Dev Conference, so many of the same presenters were present at both. One of the best parts about this conference was that the organizers let my students in for free if they took shifts volunteering at the sign-in booth. Conferences like these are very expensive, so they are not very accessible to students. As volunteers, they got full access to each presentation and breakout session and got to meet many NMA alumni who were in attendance.

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AIGA Design Educators Conference 2012 If there is one conference that I should go to every year, it is this one: the annual AIGA Design Educators Conference. However, I have never gone before because it is usually at a major city on the mainland and costs a lot of money. Thanks to Anne Bush and Chae Ho Lee at UH Manoa, they hosted the event in 2012 right here in Hawaii. Many presentations were inspiring and invaluable.

TechHui Conference 2011 & 2012 The founder of TechHui is Daniel Leucke from Ikayzo. Dan has hired four of my best students over the years and offers internships to NMA students every semester. As part of his TechHui networking initiative, Dan and his team organize local conferences with great speakers. I can recall one talk in particular, when Bernard Uy from Wall-to-Wall gave an inspiring talk revealing some of the design practices that his company uses. One slide from his presentation that uses a sliding scale to gauge client tastes resonated with me and led me to implement it into one of my ART 249 presentations.

Unconferenz 2009, 2010, & 2011 Unconferenz is a great local event with many of the same tech enthusiasts from the TechHui community. I attend Unconferenz events whenever I can for the opportunity to network with friends, see NMA graduates who are regular attendees, and take part in their informative breakout sessions and panels.

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Talks and Events I’ve attended several local talks and events over the past few years. Below is a list of few notable events that I would like to briefly highlight.

AIGA Design Week Talk 2013 I went to this event with several current and former NMA students to watch my colleague Emily Moody present. I also got to see Saedene Ota from Sae design present along with Tammy UY from MVNP and David from Unreal Hawaii. Saedene has recruited NMA students recently, David has offered internship opportunity for NMA students, and Tammy has hired two NMA graduates who currently work at MVNP.

AIGA State of the Web Talk at UHM 2010 I went with form NMA student Chris Ota to see Stephanie and Greg Rewis talk about HTML5 and CSS3. This was right when HTML5 and CSS3 first became mainstream, so it was an invaluable opportunity to learn more about them.

AIGA Design Forum 2010 at HCC This was a great local AIGA event that brought together the design students from HCC and UH Manoa. After a panel discussion with local designers, the students were able to showcase their work to the panelists for feedback.

Self-Regulation Workshop 2013 at Alani This was a gem of a workshop that was spectacular. Led by Alani Children’s center Pat Gooch, the topic of the workshop was about self-regulation specifically for pre-school aged children, but for me it was remarkably enlightening as an educator’s workshop on best practices for teaching. For example, Pat spoke about self-directed, engaged learning, a topic that means a lot to me as a teacher.

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Self-Learning Initiatives

I spend approximately ten to fifteen hours per week researching new developments in the field, consulting websites, and updating course content in additional to the preparation regularly required to teach a course.

Teaching within the NMA program demands continual education to keep up with the latest web design technologies and practices utilized by the industry. In order to keep pace with many new developments in the field of web design, I often spend my summers and non-instructional time researching and learning new technologies and techniques that I can incorporate into my teaching. During the school year, I spend an estimated average of ten to fifteen hours per week of additional preparation time outside of the classroom, in addition to the standard preparation for most courses that consists of grading, updating presentations, review of lesson plans, and office hours.

Self-learning is one of the most popular and effective ways for NMA faculty to remain up-to-date. It is a healthy practice that enables us to maintain the quality of education that our program has successfully been able to deliver over the past several years. By reading books, articles, tutorials, blogs, and videos, I learn new technologies and apply them through my personal artwork and design projects. The primary outcomes of this practice are the development of course materials, new lessons, and up-to-date instruction using the latest technologies that closely resembles the practices found in the industry. The end result is a more current instructional experience that better prepares students to enter the workforce.

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Online Courses & Webinars • Lynda.com online courses • Adobe-AIGA Responsive Web Design Webinar 2011 • Design For Hackers summer 2013 email course

Podcasts • Shop Talk • The Web Ahead • The Big Web Show • ATX Web Show

Museum Visits • Hawaii State Art Museum, Honolulu, HI • Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI • Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA • Children’s Creativity Museum, San Francisco, CA • Betty Brinn Children's Museum, Milwaukee, WI • National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC • Sony Wonder Technology Lab, New York City, NY

Freelance Design Work On a freelance basis, I periodically do design work and consultation for various clients. Often times I freelance during the summers while learning new technologies, so I occasionally am able to use my personal design work as real world examples to show my students in class. Using real world examples in the classroom provides students with an experience that closely resembles what they may see in the industry. Over the past five years, I worked on the following design projects:

• KE Identity Design & Business Cards • V2 Framework • V2 Grid

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Artwork Mapping Space 2014 An algorithmic, browser-based mapping of an undefined space using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Processing). Using code to randomly generate lines and circles in a finite space, this piece is a representation of mankind's use of technology to navigate the unknown. This piece was on display in March of 2014 at the KCC Faculty Biennial show at the Koa Gallery.

Re:Create 2012 An algorithmic code-generated print of recycled products piled in bands to form a sunset landscape. Hand sketched items were scanned, digitized, and compiled on screen. This piece was on display in May of 2012 at the Aloha Ho'omaluhia show at the Ho'omaluhia Botanical Garden Gallery.

Tagging 2012 Inspired by the layered forms of graffiti found in NYC, this browser-based piece uses code to generate fast brush strokes of random sizes and thickness as a commentary of the speed and beauty of tagging. This piece was on display in March of 2012 at the KCC Faculty Biennial show at the Koa Gallery.

ADHD Clouds 2012 An algorithmic, browser-based piece representation of a designer’s brain as it attempts to keep track of the many goals, tasks, needs, and requests of a client-based project. This piece was on display in March of 2012 at the KCC Faculty Biennial show at the Koa Gallery.

Urban Garden 2010 An algorithmic code-generated print of illustrated found objects from the Ho’omaluhia Botanical Gardens that were hand-drawn then rendered using code to form an urban garden of mixed forms to address mankind’s effect on nature. This piece was on display in May of 2010 at the Aloha Ho'omaluhia show at the Ho'omaluhia Botanical Garden Gallery.

Google: Digital Footprints – 2010 A scripted work of kinetic typography using the letters of the Google logo. This piece is a commentary on internet privacy and Google’s web crawling abilities, where the bright, primary colors of the Google logo letters eventually form a dark, muddy composition designed to cast a shadow of doubt in regards to Google’s don’t be evil mantra. This piece was on display in January of 2010 at the KCC Faculty Biennial show at the Koa Gallery.

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Professional Memberships AIGA I am a member of the Honolulu chapter of AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts). Being a member provides a venue for me to attend various talks and lectures and to network with local professionals in the field. Meeting and keeping in touch with local people in the field in invaluable for helping students get jobs after graduation.

TechHui and DesignHui I am a member of TechHui and DesignHui, two local online social networks for local designers, developers, and entrepreneurs in Hawai'i. In addition to periodically reading the online forums and discussions, I use these social platforms as a means to network with local professionals in the field and former NMA graduates. I also utilize their job postings page to post job openings when we need to find a lecturer to teach a class.

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SERVICE

Over the past five years I have been a part of several committees and extra-curricular initiatives at various levels servicing my program, department, campus, and community. I value each of these experiences as opportunities to become a better all-around educator and member of the KCC community.

On the program level, I am continually seeking ways for how I can make the NMA program better for my students and fellow faculty. To this end, I gave NMA program presentations to various local and visiting schools, designed and maintained the NMA web site, updated promotional materials, helped to organize student events, and served on several NMA screening committees. As a member of the local AIGA, I also served as faculty advisor for the NMA AIGA student group and NMA Club every year for the past five years.

On the department level, I attended department meetings, conducted peer evaluations for my colleagues, and served two years on our DPC.

On the campus level, I served on two non-discipline DPC’s, two non-discipline screening committees, played softball for the KCC Royals, and helped the Student Success Committee with the design of their final report, web page, and promotional video.

On the UH system level, I served on seven TPRC’s and represented KCC at UH system-wide digital media meetings.

On the community level, I gave several local talks and presentations that were open to the public, including being a presenter, panelist, and critique at the AIGA Design Forum 2012 and presenter at MacFest 2010. I also served on the Alani Children’s Center advisory board for the past three years.

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Service to My Discipline • NMA Web Site

o 2009-2014 – I designed and maintained the NMA web site and updated all NMA promotional materials, including the NMA brochure and social media accounts.

• NMA Hiring/Screening Committees o NMA – Interface Design full-time position o NMA – UHWO full-time position

• NMA AIGA and NMA Club Faculty Advisor o 2009-2014 – served as faculty advisor to the two NMA student groups:

The NMA Club and NMA AIGA student group. • NMA Intern Supervisor

o Fall 2011 (2 students) o Spring 2012 (2 students) o Spring 2013 (1 student) o Fall 2013 (1 student) o Spring 2014 (1 student)

• NMA Admissions Portfolio Reviews o 2009-2013 – attended the annual NMA portfolio review meetings as a

faculty reviewer and convener.

Service to My Department • Department DPC Member

o Fall 2013 – Arts & Humanities DPC o Fall 2012 – Arts & Humanities DPC

• Peer Evaluations 1. Fall 2009 – NMA Lecturer 2. Fall 2010 – NMA Full-time instructor 3. Spring 2011 – NMA Lecturer 4. Fall 2011 – NMA Lecturer 5. Spring 2013 – NMA Lecturer 6. Fall 2013 – NMA Lecturer 7. Spring 2014 – ART Full-time instructor 8. Spring 2014 – NMA Counselor

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Service to The College • Screening Committees

o Spring 2011 – Pathways Learning Support Position o Spring 2014 - CELTT Web Developer

• Non-Department DPC Member o Fall 2010 – KCC Counseling DPC o Fall 2011 – KCC Counseling DPC

• Helping the Student Success Committee o Spring 2014 – I helped to committee members create their web site,

design the layout of their print report, and helped to produce their informational video with a NMA student.

• Softball Player & Fan o Fall 2011 – Player o When not playing, I attended each game as a fan with my family.

Service to The UH-System • TPRCs

1. Spring 2011 – KCC 2. Spring 2011 – KauiCC 3. Spring 2012 – KCC (Chairperson) 4. Spring 2012 – HawCC 5. Spring 2013 – KCC (Chairperson and Convener) 6. Spring 2014 – KCC (Chairperson) 7. Spring 2014 – LeeCC

• UH-System Digital Media Meetings o December 1st, 2010 – at UH Manoa

• UHWO Creative Media Meetings o September 28th, 2012 – at KCC o October 10th, 2013 – at KCC o January 22nd, 2014 – at KCC

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Service to The Community • Talks & Presentations

• April 11th, 2013 – Waimea High School graphics class presentation § Waimea High School Students visited my ART 285 studio class. I

showed the visiting students what NMA students were working on and arranged for NMA students to speak about their work (see the thank you card in the Service section of the appendix).

• March 18th, 2012 – AIGA Design Forum § Gave a twenty minute presentation on my personal artwork and

served as a discussion panelist and critic (see the brochure in the Services section of the appendix)

• Sept. 10th, 2012 – Hokua University Graduation § Gave a presentation on NMA to visiting students as part of their

graduation activities. • May 2nd, 2011 – Kaimuki High School Presentation

§ Gave an informational NMA presentation as part of the KCC-Kaimuki High School Summer Bridge program (see letter of appreciation in the Services section of the appendix)

• Dec. 1st 2010 – Jarrett Middle School Career Day § Gave an informational NMA presentation to local middle school

students in Palolo. • May 1st, 2010 – MacFest Presentation

§ Gave a behind-the-scenes presentation on the design process for interface design to Hawaii Macintosh & Apple Users' Society members and local community.

• October 22nd, 2010 – PCATT Breakout Session § Presented during a breakout session entitled "Animation and

Interface Design at KCC New Media Arts" with my colleague, Sharon Sussman, at the PCATT 10 Year Anniversary Celebration at Honolulu Community College.

• Professional Activities • Aloha Hoʻomaluhia Invitations

2010-2014 – Helped with the photography and design of the invitations for this annual group gallery event that showcases the artwork of many KCC faculty members.

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• Table/Booth Representation • May 11th, 2010 – Farrington High School Film Festival

§ Attended the annual Farrington High School Film Festival as a table booth presenter with NMA lab manager Joe Mahi

• April 6th, 2012 - Farrington High School NMA Table Booth § Attended the annual Farrington High School Film Festival as a

table booth presenter with NMA lab manager Joe Mahi • October 28th, 2011 – UH CTE Conference

§ Attended the 2011 UH CTE Conference at the Sheraton Waikiki as a table booth presenter with NMA lab manager Joe Mahi, my colleague Ailed Garcia, and a NMA student (see the conference flyer in the Service section of the appendix).

• Alani Children’s Center Advisory Board • 2011-2014 – Served on the Alani Children’s Center Advisory Board as a

faculty representative. Alani is KCC’s on-campus early childhood care and education center for children of the campus community.

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LEADERSHIP

My leadership accomplishments extend beyond my primary duties and standard responsibilities as NMA discipline coordinator. Below is a list of a few specific accomplishments that demonstrate my leadership as an educator and commitment to my campus and colleagues.

Five Year Curriculum Updates During the 2011-2012 academic year, I organized the updating of all NMA courses to meet the department and campus mid-year deadline (end of February 2012). I worked with NMA faculty to strategically develop a new “competency” system with thought-out language that aligns well with program SLO’s, making assessment easier in the future. All twenty seven NMA active courses were updated. Eighteen others were inactivated (thanks to Liz Nakoa and Kapu Landgraf). I did fourteen NMA courses myself and helped others to complete the rest. I also organized a "Bang It Out!" NMA Curriculum-a-thon 2012 meeting on Friday Feb 17th 2012, where I gathered NMA faculty to complete all outstanding five-year updates. I am proud to have helped my colleagues successfully meeting our deadline.

Program-level Assessment I spearhead the annual NMA program Student Learning Outcomes (SLO’s) assessment process, where at the end of every year I gather faculty to evaluate student work in relation to our program SLO’s. I drafted the rubric and assessment system to evaluate all NMA capstone student work on an annual basis. At each meeting, I facilitate the discussion and reflective process of identifying areas of program-level improvement and document our findings in the NMA Program Annual Assessment report (see the example NMA Program Annual Assessment report in the Leadership section of the appendix).

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Course-level Assessment In the spring of 2013, I spearheaded the implementation of course-level assessment for all NMA courses to meet a campus deadline of May 10th, 2013, where every course needed to assess at least one competency for each course. This was a difficult challenge because NMA had twenty-three courses taught by eleven different teachers. To facilitate the process, I developed an online assessment system for NMA faculty to quickly and easily submit their data via a custom web-based form that I created for each course. I created a web page with clear instructions including a video demonstration of how to use the online submission form. Once all data was submitted, it was stored in online spreadsheets using Google Drive. I then created a script that auto generated the CLR reports for each course, which I then posted on our NMA CLR web page and submitted to our department chair. I am proud to have been able to utilize a combination of my web design and leadership skills to help meet the campus deadline. I am currently working with NMA faculty to implement a new and improved system that is more comprehensive and robust. So far, three of us have used this new system to assess all of our competencies for each of our courses. Personally, I refined the process to align directly with my individual course projects and personal grading system, so I can quickly and efficiently assess all of my competencies for each course every semester. I have shared my system with my colleagues as a potential solution to make the process more seamless and efficient for them in the future if they choose to adopt it.

New Studio Courses From 2010-2012, I worked with NMA faculty to develop and implement two new NMA courses: ART 284 Animation Studio and ART 285 Interface Design Studio. These two new courses embrace the studio-based learning model to address several issues that were discovered during the assessment process, notably a) the need for more depth into specific NMA-related topics, b) the need for students to become independent self-learners to succeed after graduation, c) the need for students to gain more experience going through the full creative process in order to create industry quality portfolio and demo-reel products, and d) the need to work in collaborative team environments to develop strong inter-personal communication skills needed to succeed in the industry/workplace. I put together an informational presentation that I presented to our NMA Advisory Board in 2010 (see the presentation in the Leadership section of the appendix) and successfully facilitated the approval of the A.S. degree changes. Both courses have been offered for the past two years with great success.

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Helping My Colleagues We’ve hired many lecturers and a two new full-time faculty over years. As one of the more senior members of the NMA program, I see it as my responsibility to help the younger teachers however I can. I do not see myself as a model for anyone to follow, quite the contrary actually, so I’m not a big fan of the word mentor to describe how I help my colleagues. Instead, I like to share my experiences with them, especially my mistakes and failures, so they can learn from my past mishaps and poor decisions.

Over the past five years I have met with several colleagues who have come to me for advice on how to address certain challenges, both inside and outside of the classroom. Sometimes I offer teaching advice, such as my three S-S-S delivery system, and sometimes I offer non-teaching advice, such as how to balance work and personal life. I am truly humbled and flattered that these colleagues ask me for advice. In all situations my goal is the same: to help my colleagues enjoy their job here at KCC, because their happiness directly impacts the lives of their families, coworkers, and students.

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CONCLUSION

Thank you

Over the past five years, my teaching has evolved to embrace new teaching practices, techniques, and technologies. I taught nine different NMA courses, each with its own custom designed web page with custom course lessons, presentations, exercises, tutorials, and projects that I continually modified and improved upon every year. Every semester I receive positive student evaluations and many of my students have gone on to become successful designers in the local industry after graduation.

For five of the past six years, I served as NMA discipline coordinator making significant contributions that have lead to a healthy and successful program. In addition to the standard discipline coordinator responsibilities of scheduling courses, hiring lecturers, and completing program related reports, the NMA program coordinator duties included managing three computer labs, overseeing a full-time lab manager, balancing an annual budget, managing external grants, and organizing student shows.

My professional development initiatives include a combination of attending conferences and various other self-learning activities that have increased my level of expertise in my field and improved my awareness and understanding of the student experience. Over the past five years, I attended eight conferences, attended several local talks, and stayed up-to-date on many new aspects of new media art and interface design by reading research articles, online articles, tutorials, and videos.

Over the past five years, I provided service at various levels to my program, department, campus, and community. I served on four screening committees, four DPC’s, and seven TPRC’s. I gave NMA program presentations to various local and visiting schools and several local talks and presentations that were open to the public. I served as faculty advisor for the NMA student groups and as board member on the Alani Children Center advisory board.

Lastly, I have embraced the responsibility of being a leader within my program by proposing several degree revisions, creating new courses, updating curriculum, and implementing several new assessment practices on both the course and program level. I organized the five-year course update process for all NMA courses in 2012. I led all

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annual NMA program-level SLO assessment cycles and developed a new NMA course-level assessment system in 2013. I also mentored young teachers, managed several grants, and was the point-person and spokesperson for the NMA program.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

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Sources:

1 Lackey, J.A. “A History of the Studio-based Learning Model.” 1999. Accessed April 2012. (http://schoolstudio.engr.wisc.edu/studiobasedlearning.html)

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