{"id":20756,"date":"2022-11-25T01:18:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-24T23:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.esmt.berlin\/voices\/?p=20756"},"modified":"2022-11-25T09:21:31","modified_gmt":"2022-11-25T07:21:31","slug":"evolution-and-innovation-behind-the-scenes-with-esmt-edtech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.esmt.berlin\/voices\/evolution-and-innovation-behind-the-scenes-with-esmt-edtech\/","title":{"rendered":"Evolution and innovation \u2013 behind the scenes with ESMT EdTech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Niko<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I first came to ESMT Berlin as a student ten years ago while I was still a candidate in the Berlin Doctoral Program in Economics and Management Science (BDPEMS). I started working at ESMT as a faculty research assistant (FRA) in 2014. Shortly thereafter, a particularly nasty macroeconomics test hastened my exit from BDPEMS as well as my divorce from that bitterest of exes, economics.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the next few years, I continued my work as an FRA while pursuing my own research interests, with notable support and mentorship from Professor Matthew Bothner. In 2019, after re-signing my FRA contract for the fourth or fifth time, Wilina from HR asked what my plans were, and I realized I should probably shake things up professionally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, the newly formed EdTech team was searching for a new learning designer. I hadn\u2019t considered a career in EdTech before, but the role let me leverage my experience working with ESMT faculty and aligned well with my profile and skillset. I was lucky enough to get the job, and I\u2019ve been happily growing with my team ever since.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was really illuminating to step from one side of the corridor (research) to the other (teaching). (Also, the EdTech office was on the cool side of the building \u2013 and I mean that in terms of the heat in summer!) I\u2019m particularly proud of our team\u2019s record of launching a new MBA program each year since 2019. I\u2019m very thankful to Nick Barniville, our former director, whose guidance, support, and trust allowed everyone on our team to flourish, both professionally and personally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As ESMT\u2019s online portfolio grows, it\u2019s important for all of us on the EdTech team to continue developing professionally. I first saw the ESMT Coding Boot Camp advertised in 2020, but I still felt too new in my role as a learning designer to take on part-time study. But over the past eighteen months, we have increasingly had to go \u201cunder the hood\u201d with various technologies and engage more and more with developers. The importance of having someone on the team who \u201cspeaks developer\u201d has thus grown significantly. Similarly, having a developer in-house will open us up to more opportunities, make us less dependent on third-party solutions, and help us to leverage the wealth of data our online systems collect.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The boot camp has been one of the best decisions I\u2019ve made. While very demanding \u2013 with 10 class hours plus up to 20 further hours of independent work per week, over six months \u2013 the format, exercises, and support were all first-rate. Everyone involved was invested in helping us achieve our learning and professional goals. Classes were fun and challenging with lots of scaffolding, and the material was curated to meet the demands of the current job market.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were three particularly rewarding group projects in which we ideated, designed, built, and deployed web applications while learning how developers work collaboratively in teams. For my second project, I worked with a fellow boot camp recruit, Oliver Measson, to develop a tool for our executive education program managers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Great Migration to Remote Work under the pandemic, ExecEd had been using a third-party tool to randomly pair program participants for virtual coffee meetups, replacing the face-to-face contact they would have had on campus. While the tool was popular, the pricing was prohibitive, so I volunteered to work on a substitute. We began testing our tool \u2013 which we called Latte Lotto \u2013 in certain programs beginning last spring. I have plans to develop it into a more extensible networking tool, for example, for internal networking or cross-program mentorship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My final project was a working model of an elective allocation system, which I developed to solve a problem the Full-Time MBA program office will face next year: Fairly allocating students into electives with limited capacity, based on their preferences. I\u2019ve continued working on this project over the last six months (with invaluable ongoing support from my coding instructor from the boot camp, Swapnil Gaikwad), and in October I presented the latest version to some cluster directors and program managers, to an encouragingly positive response. It\u2019s been especially rewarding to work towards solving a real-world problem that my colleagues are facing, and I\u2019m excited about the prospect of this tool being used next year by our MBA students. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The whole team is really excited about the transition from EdTech Lab to Learning Innovation Lab. We\u2019re particularly looking forward to working across the school on other technology-enhanced teaching and learning projects. To date, our focus has been largely on course development, and we now boast a full portfolio of courses, most of which have been delivered and refined multiple times. Thus, we\u2019re starting to shift our focus toward scaling:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n