Chicago-Kent Team Wins 2020 Illinois Tech Staff Excellence Award
As the COVID-19 pandemic altered education across the world this year, four veteran Chicago-Kent College of Law staff members—Emily Barney, technology training and marketing librarian; Debbie Ginsberg, educational technology librarian; Sue Jadin, assistant director of administration and finance; and Sejal Vaishnav (CS ’03, M.B.A. ’10), director of information technology and AV—worked together to seamlessly pivot the college to online and hybrid courses. Their successful efforts earned them the 2020 Staff Excellence Award for Innovative Solutions that Improve the Experience of Illinois Tech Students or Alumni.
In her nomination, Jean Wenger, director of the Chicago-Kent College of Law Library, noted how each employee contributed to the team’s overarching goal, which “was always a consistent experience for Chicago-Kent students and faculty.” Considered the law school’s technology experts, the team worked in various capacities over the spring, summer, and fall—developing needs surveys, and testing and training documents and videos, strategizing integrations with both existing tools and new ones, overseeing equipment installation, holding tech bootcamps for faculty, producing quick guides, and efficiently communicating with stakeholders—to ensure that the fall semester learning experience would be a positive one.
The team shares, “We’ve all known each other for over 15 years and collaborated on many projects in the past. This time we worked with campus partners (classroom tech team OTS and the Center for Learning Innovation) to design classrooms that would provide a seamless home to the classroom experience and introduced Blackboard Ultra as the new learning management system to the law school community. For fall we successfully launched Zoom/Panopto and Blackboard as an integrated solution to the Chicago-Kent community as a one-stop shop for both faculty and students. Our trusted relationships with faculty, staff, and students allow us to facilitate and implement solutions with great buy-in.”
As Wenger highlighted in her nomination, the team understood the special needs of law students, who rely on the lecture and dialogue that predominates during a class session, and addressed how to best approach the varied types of instruction, which included day and evening sessions, traditional doctrinal courses, clinics, seminars, and even the trial advocacy program. While the project arose out of an immediate need necessitated by the pandemic, its benefits will be felt and utilized for years to come. The team says that they eagerly applied feedback from students, faculty, and staff into their work, and designed the project to feature long-term resources for distance education as well as to provide greater flexibility for in-person classes.
“Without their dedication, law students and faculty would not have had the productive and enriching educational experiences during the spring, summer, and fall semesters,” Wenger told the awards committee in her nomination of the Chicago-Kent team. “In responding to a recent tech survey, a law student commented, ‘The school is doing a spectacular job. Other schools should look at [Chicago-]Kent to learn best practices.’”
