Teaching

I taught courses in the Master of Science in Learning and Organizational Change program at Northwestern University from 2006 to 2024.

MSLOC 430 – Creating and Sharing Knowledge

This course explored enterprise social networking technology and its impact on organizational knowledge and organizational learning in the workplace. I taught MSLOC 430 from 2008 – 2024 with co-instructors including Samir Desai, Keeley Sorokti and Lisa Tallman.

MSLOC 456 – Designing Solutions for Organizational Effectiveness

This course was first offered in Summer, 2018, with lead instructor Teresa Torres. I co-taught with Teresa from 2018 – 2024. This was the capstone course to a 4-course certificate program called Designing for Organizational Effectiveness.

Co-creating Change

Teresa and I also taught a version of MSLOC 456 as part of the executive education program Executive Learning & Organizational Change. The course – Co-Creating Change – was targeted at leaders who wish to adopt design philosophy and methods to change the way they lead their teams.

Designing for Organizational Effectiveness Certification

Teresa Torres and I led the design of this 4-course, 12-month certificate program and led the co-curricular activities that make this program a certification. Candidates for the certification must complete all four courses in the sequence and work on a design case proposal to learn how to adapt design methods and practices to address organizational effectiveness challenges.

MSLOC 460 – Discovering and Designing Innovation (past)

In this course, students teams followed a design process and used design tools to develop potential innovative solutions to an organizational challenge. Each course was based on a challenge presented by a collaborating organization. I taught MSLOC 460 between 2008 and 2019.

Other teaching projects

With Kimberly Scott, I co-facilitated a 5-week open course in October, 2013 called Exploring Personal Learning Networks (#xplrpln on Twitter) that was a mashup of connectivist MOOC design and problem-based learning. 

Exploring Personal Learning Networks was a design experiment – and a pivotal experience. It was not associated with any formal MSLOC course or with the program in general. It was a way for Kimberly and me to legitimately explore a topic of interest to us, but also in the process to experiment with open course design, to learn-by-doing.

Out of Exploring Personal Learning networks emerged several efforts to “pop the lid off” of MSLOC 430. One version is summarized here, which led to me creating msloc430.net. The msloc430.net site is no longer available but I summarize the design in this post. The design of msloc430.net – using a single hub site to aggregate blog posts from students who are using their own blog sites – led to the design of the Designing for Organizational Effectiveness site and its syndication of student posts.

The Hive

The design, development and use of an enterprise social network platform to support both formal and informal learning at MSLOC was also instrumental in my teaching (and learning how to teach).

The Hive was a private, online community for all MSLOC students, faculty, staff and alumni. It was launched in 2012 and became an engaging community largely through the effort of our first community strategist, Keeley Sorokti.

In 2016, Kimberly Scott, Keeley Sorokti and I published our insights into the value of such communities: Kimberly S. Scott, Keeley H. Sorokti, Jeffrey D. Merrell, Learning “beyond the classroom” within an enterprise social network system, In The Internet and Higher Education, Volume 29, 2016, Pages 75-90, ISSN 1096-7516, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.12.005.