whoami

My name is Andy Freed. I've been working at PCC for 22 years. I feel very deeply that the right technology, when well supported, can help people overcome barriers to their educational goals. I have worked in several roles at Portland Community College; all have focused on supporting students and in their use of technology to interact, to communicate, and to learn.

I am currently the Director of Learning Technologies & Innovation in Online Learning . I supervise a team of student services, student and faculty support professionals as well as manage the various technologies and platforms used by Online Learning. This includes the Faculty Help Desk, the Student Help Desk.

Our online learning ecosystem consists of D2L Brightspace, Zoom, Kaltura, and a panoply of connected tools like VoiceThread, Ally (soon to be Yuja Panorama), Hypothes.is, Annoto, Kahoot, and much more. My team manages these tools and provides integration support for a variety of integrations of varying degrees of quality.

In the last few years, I've become more invovled in helping the college provide greater access to student services for online students. Some of our biggest projects lately are focused on increasing partiy to service for online students. After all, as of Fall 2015, over 44% of PCC students were taking at least one online course, and 20% of the credit FTE comes from online classes. Mainstream, yo.

I also serve on a plethora of committees at the College, including the Strategic Enrollment and Advising Leadership, Enterprise Resource Planning Work Group, Accessible Digital Environment Council (co-chair), College Student Affairs Leadership Team, Future Classroom Technology Workgroup (co-chair), Change Control Board, OER Steering Committee, Media Tactics, LMS Support Group, and probably another one soon. I also participate in OCCDLA, MSDL, NEBSA, and a group that likes to get pickelbacks when attending ITC and/or D2L Fusion.

Presentations

Oh, and check out our Instructional best practices blog.