Hello from Southern California

Hello from Southern California

by Harry Lord -
Number of replies: 0

I am Harry Lord, starting my 4th year (of a 5 year grant) as the Title V Web 2.0 Tech Director at East Los Angeles College (with 67,000 students) the largest of 9 colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District, assisting faculty to use technology for their classes.

Kevin Huotari (our ePortfolio Developer) and I work closely with Professional Development, the Academic Senate Chair and Department Chairs to create workshops for our faculty. This semester our focus is on web-enhanced active learning, with year-long series of workshops for full-time faculty [The Professional Learning Series] and new faculty [The New Faculty Institute], as well as a 2 day Winter workshop for Adjuncts (with 60 signed up). The next step will be to add learner analytics and classroom assessments.

About 4 years ago, our IT dept started to use Sharepoint to develop an LMS for the campus (but without faculty input, initially), but since it was not ready, several intructors brought Moodle to the campus for web-enhanced F2F course support and interaction. In addition, all DE courses use Etudes (a Sakai derivative). We recently developed and managed an online pedagogy course for our DE instructors.

Although I grew up in New England with my undergraduate work at Tufts University (Boston area), I came to UCSD (San Diego) for graduate school. From there to the the Jet Propulsion Lab (Pasadena, CA), and from there to industry, co-founding an international environmental monitoring business, as the Senior Scientist initially and ultimately as CEO. I found that the sales and service staff were inept at training users and regulatory agencies, so I took on that responsibility, and found that I loved it! So I retired and began teaching, and here I am.

I teach a night course each semester at Mt. San Antonio College (Walnut, CA) to satisfy my need for student interactions. My passions are teaching and technology. My Twitter account is ELAC_hlord3; LinkedIn is Harry Lord; Facebook is Harry C. Lord