Professional Development
From May 2018 through March 2020, I took a leave of absence from my Lecturer position at the university and worked at Crowdmark, an educational technology company. I had an incredibly rewarding work experience that continues to impact my teaching and service at the University of Waterloo.
In my role at Crowdmark, I worked directly with a team of software engineers, designers, sales account executives and reported directly to the CEO. I worked very closely with the product manager and designer to map out, implement and test new product features. I presented at technology conferences and introduced faculty and directors of various university technology groups to Crowdmark. I also reached out to and collaborated with faculty members at multiple institutions to create workshops that we presented together at education conferences.I trained faculty members and teaching assistants on implementing Crowdmark into their courses both in person and through virtual workshops.
Working with such a small team on a product that was so widely used, I had an extensive range of responsibilities and took on a number of new initiatives. Some of these included:
- Providing leadership on feature development and guidance on developing the product roadmap
- Guiding team on views of customers to improve business, products and practices
- Collaborating with the software development team on quality assurance, product testing and troubleshooting
- Resolving user technical problems
- Writing business documentation as part of procurement processes through written responses to RFIs and RFPs.
- Designing and leading live RSP presentation to key stakeholders at various academic institutions
- Presenting product features in virtual and live demonstrations with key decision makers and faculty at academic institutions around North America and worldwide
- Managing multiple accounts at various stage of sales cycle
- Participating in regular product development, customer success and internal business sessions to ensure product and customer requirements are met
- Collaborating with university information technology teams on integration of product into their systems
- Writing support documentation and blog articles to accompany new features
- Leading product testing of new feature development
One of the key projects that I completed was researching and developing Crowdmark's Multiple Choice analytics feature together with one of the software engineers. I had not used multiple choice assessments much in my teaching in the past and I came to appreciate the work that many instructors put in to developing a meaningful and fair multiple choice assessment. We released the analytics feature at the end of 2019 and I wrote an article for instructors to accompany the tool explaining the statistical methods used to gain an understanding into student learning and guide improvement of these multiple choice assessments.
