As a Creative Instructional Designer, I design and deliver trainings for faculty, manage online learning programs, and support faculty, staff, and students in their use of digital tools, media-hosting platforms, and content/learning management systems. I’m especially interested in digital accessibility, and over the past five years I’ve helped optimize my team’s workflows for remediating PDFs to use in online course components. Most recently, I have designed workflows for processing and fulfilling text-to-speech accommodations for all of Emerson College. I have over ten (10) years of experience in the field of instructional design/technology and faculty development, and five (5) years of experience teaching, researching, and collaborating in higher education.
I became interested in technology’s applications to pedagogy while designing the rhetoric, composition, and research methods courses that I taught at UNC-Chapel Hill during my PhD studies in English. My students experimented with new media, pursued term-length custom research topics, and participated in an online peer-review process that spanned several networked classes.
At the same time, I worked at UNC’s Studio for Instructional Technology in English Studies (SITES). Under the tutelage of Dr. Dan Anderson, I branched out into video poetry and open source e-scholarship inspired by Zen Buddhist mindfulness practices. By thinking outside the box about the creative applications of digital tools, I continuously develop new ways to help faculty incorporate technology into their teaching and scholarship.
In addition to these things, I’m the proud dad of an adorably goofy dog and an avid video/tabletop gamer.
Dr. Dante Von Blitzen.
Resume
Please use the link below to download my current resume. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss any aspect of my work or collaborate.
Created in collaboration with Rachel Levin. This is a video tutorial for faculty on recognizing and adding accessibility features to documents created in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. It covers types of digital documents, heading styles, alternate text, descriptive hyperlinks, list formats, colors, and graphics.
Creating Accessible Videos
This is a video tutorial for faculty on finding captioned videos and adding captions to existing videos. It covers the difference between subtitles and captions, automatic versus human captions, correcting auto-captions in Panopto, and using auto-captions in Zoom.
Journey Through the Dark Forest
This is an educational escape-the-room puzzle created using Google Forms. It’s designed as an interactive demo for my hour-long synchronous workshop “Building Online Community: Gamification,” which was delivered in several iterations to Emerson College faculty in 2021.
A multiple-answer question from “Journey Through the Dark Forest.”
Emerson College’s Instructional Technology Group (a 7-10 person team of designers and technologists) remediates documents and media for 20+ fully-online courses each semester. To optimize and project-manage the team’s remediation workflows for PDFs, I created a Trello board on which cards, representing individual documents, can flow from “New” to “OCRed” to “Tagged & Added to Course.” The board also includes a “course card” for each course and instructor that contains links to Google Drive folders for uploading finished documents. To increase efficiency, I used If This Then That (IFTTT) to automate card creation. When an instructor uploads a document to their “Original PDFs” Drive folder, IFTTT applets automatically generate a card in the Trello board’s “New” list containing identifying info about the document and a link to download it. Using this process, my team has successfully remediated all submitted documents for online courses over the past five years.
