Another semester, over.

Another cohort of students moving on.

“Alicia, are you off all summer?” and then I laugh and laugh. Most decidedly not.

Summer is in fact when our work ramps up. It’s hard for instructors to juggle their teaching workloads with building a new course, and indeed the success of their current students is their highest priority. So when the semester winds down, when their grades are in, and when they can finally see the light of day beyond the stacks of To Dos…instructors start to explore their horizons. They start to consider what might be new out there that would enhance their current course, or whether there’s a new course their students have been asking for.

That’s where we come in. That’s where the fun stuff starts!

The summers are full of inspirations and stumbling blocks, frustrations and triumphs. I love hearing the buzz around our offices, “why don’t we try…” and “have you thought of…” or, my personal favourite: “now that’s really cool.” We’re building new components of courses, new courses altogether, this summer we’re even starting to build NEW PROGRAMS! Full online programs! It’s actually really really cool. We get to work with some instructors who have grown alongside our team, we get to bring along new colleagues just starting out, we add in eager students and a bunch of cool new tech and our summers are one blur of activity and challenge and growth.

In the summers, I miss teaching. I miss my WordPress workshops with students, I miss seeing the campus full of students (they block my view of the geese…) but the summers really renew my sense of what is possible. And my sense of awe in the fact that I get to work beside all this inspiration, and contribute to a thing that I’m proud of.