Living in the Space of the Unknown

Tiffany Snyder ‘13, ‘15 has always been eager to learn, and her curiosity brought her right to IWU.

Tiffany Snyder’s job at IWU is all about learning for the purpose of innovation, and she has a genuine love for this institution and the life she’s built here.

She’s also earned two IWU degrees, although she didn’t choose IWU because of her parents or her siblings or even as school guidance counselor’s advice.

She has been fascinated by life calling and life coaching since she was in high school. As a teenager, her curiosities led her online where she stumbled upon the Center for Life Calling and Leadership on IWU’s website.

As a high school student, she decided to drive over an hour to IWU’s Marion campus on a school day, navigated her way to the Life Calling office, and asked to meet with Bill Millard, the executive director at the time and a theorist in life calling. Tiffany’s unannounced visit and conversation about life calling with Bill that day led to her attending IWU as a first-generation college student and working in Bill’s department.

After graduation, she then transitioned to full-time employment for the Life Calling office while earning her master’s degree. This eventually led to a promotion to a director position in Life Calling, putting her right at the intersection of her passions and helping her practice what she was learning in her graduate program.

But it didn’t feel quite right.

“Things were going well, but I just felt like I missed school. I always believed to whom much is given, much is expected. I had all my mentors drilling it into my mind,” Tiffany said.

So she enrolled in a Ph.D. program with an emphasis in the integration of psychology, technology and learning, and she’s really proud of it. As I am writing this, she is preparing to defend her dissertation in just a few hours, in fact.

But Tiffany is rarely satisfied as a learner. Hungry to know more about education technology and innovation, she started calling experts across the IWU community, inviting them to meet her for lunch and talk about their areas of expertise. That’s how she met Brad Garner and others who helped her feel connected to the field and shared her excitement.

Brad serves as Director of Faculty Enrichment in the Center for Learning and Innovation (CLI) at IWU–National & Global. His team is responsible for being forward thinkers and helping faculty members create meaningful online experiences using the latest tools, technology and practices.

The faculty enrichment team is just part of the reason Tiffany has now shifted to sharing her skills and knowledge with more global engagement in mind. She’s now putting her curiosity to work alongside Brad as Assistant Director of Faculty Enrichment.

“Tiffany has a long track record of being a great team member and a person who is always anxious to learn new things,” Brad said. During the first week in her new role in Faculty Enrichment, Brad asked her to co-host their new podcast, Digital2Learn, where they interview experts in higher education, technology, neuroscience and more. Their goal is to help faculty and administrators all over the world explore new ideas that better serve students.

Today, their audience and guests reach far beyond the IWU community. The podcast also recently expanded into a monthly project called Undersized Ideas, Oversized Impact, where the team synthesizes research on small ideas that could make a big splash.

One of these small ideas started in early 2020, when their team conducted research on online courses that blended asynchronous and synchronous elements. That is, they wanted to know if online students benefited from engaging with their professors in real-time periodically throughout the course. The answer, as they expected, was yes, and the results of their study were even published by EDUCAUSE last November. Now they are training all faculty across the IWU–National & Global campus to offer these opportunities in their virtual classrooms. They hope it will be a model for other courses and programs as well.

The search for new technologies and innovative ideas never ends for CLI and Faculty Enrichment, and they are eager to do the work. In 2020, they started exploring integrating virtual reality in the classroom and offering learning platforms that facilitate greater access to education for students in all kinds of environments around the world.

“When we hear about big headlines, about how much education is changing, we don’t shy away. We don’t sink down in our chairs,” Tiffany said. “We just inflate with energy, and it inspires us to dream. We are comfortable living in the space of the unknown.”

And, just in case you were wondering, Tiffany Snyder, Ph.D., successfully defended her dissertation.

Written by Rachel Ashley ‘11

DIGITAL2LEARN (D2L) PODCAST CAN BE FOUND AT digital2learn.com

It has more than 5,200 downloads and reached its 75th episode on March 1, 2021. Episode themes include digital literacy, data analytics, virtual reality, student success, synchronous learning, digital badges, edtech, student equity, open resources and more.