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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development.

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MISTY CROOKS, HOST: I’m Misty Crooks, a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Graduate Center and a fellow in the Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. In this episode of Alumni Aloud, I interview Thomas Harbison, who graduated from our program in History and is now the Acting Director of Digital Education at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. He talks to us about utilizing your graduate school experience for a career at the intersection of digital worlds and learning.

Tom, thanks for joining us today. To start with, would you mind giving us an overview of your organization’s mission and what your role is there?

HARBISON: Yes, thanks for having me. I’m currently acting director of the E-learning center and digital education at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. We were founded about ten years ago with an original mission to promote and implement online courses at the college. Things have changed a whole lot recently, of course, with the pandemic. But already before that there were plenty of years of change where the use of technology for teaching in face-to-face courses, web enhanced kind of courses, and then hybrids and different blends and everything in between. So the current mission is to support digital education across the curriculum, across the college. We support both faculty and students and work closely with staff, and mainly staff from academic affairs and student affairs to support the infusion of digital education as widely as possible. There still is a focus on courses that have online components. We do disproportionately work with faculty and students who are enrolled in online or remote learning. During the pandemic that of course changed things in a major way, so we needed to pivot quickly just like everybody else to a new reality where we had nearly all of our courses in a remote format.

CROOKS: That’s really interesting. There’s been a lot of talk in the education field since the pandemic with the possibilities have been opened up for remote learning. Do you see that change happening?

HARBISON: Yes, I think of it as more than just one wave in that being in the CUNY environment and being at a, specifically at a community college. Being so close to it, I see some particular ways that it’s playing out for our students at BMCC and our faculty in ways that differ. I think this happens whenever you’re this close to something. A professor at the Grad Center who made a point at one point that if you get close enough in, the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side look very different from one another, and the cultures are very different from one another. But if you move back far away enough, then that, that disappears. So the kind of change, I think, will mean something very different if we’re talking about community college students at CUNY versus. Even within that, we’re talking about adult learners or if we’re talking about right out of high school learners, there’s going to be major differences. And the reason I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences in how this overall sea change impacts our college and CUNY is that we’re now competing in higher education online and remote learning spaces. There’s so much out there now that can be tapped into. We’re looking for, what does CUNY uniquely have to offer, and for that I like to look to all the things that we did well before the pandemic and will continue to do well afterward. And as we move out of this emergency mode where we’re reacting to it, we’ve been looking for strategies to, well, hybridize and blend all resources that we have for our on-campus students who, by choice, are going to be remote rather than then forced into it. So the short answer is, yes there’s a sea change. What I’ve been spending the most time in thinking about has been some of the particularities about what it’s going to mean for our community.

CROOKS: Yeah, it sounds like the next ten years or so will be really interesting to watch this. How did you get interested in this field of digital education?

HARBISON: Technology in general started, I was a history undergraduate major, so straight humanities without any or much technology, other than just you know, tinkering with PCs and that kind of thing. And maybe one computer science class and C++. After undergraduate, I was mostly moving in the direction of teaching, got certified to teach middle school and high school social studies, but had a brief interlude of working for a startup tech company, 1999, 2000. That gave me a little, a little taste of that and some learning on the job, web applications. Then I ended up at the Graduate Center starting in 2004. That was after determining that middle school social studies, the path I opted for was to go for older students. At the Graduate Center right away I was shown the certificate programs and encouraged to start up one of those in addition to the major and the minor in the department. And the one that caught my eye right away was the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate (ITP) founded by Steve Briar. There were a few signs pointing that way. Signed up for it and started taking the classes. That jump started my interest in instructional technology and applications of technology to teaching. Right around that same time, I did a little bit of work for the American Social History Project and the New Media Lab. That got me interested in the application of technology to some research and display of research on the web. So those things were happening, were intertwining with one another, some of that work. I started working as an editorial assistant for the Radical History Review, and increasingly technology was coming into play, some digital humanities around the edges of that. We were moving, this is a simpler kind of change, but we were moving from paper manuscript trafficking to digital only. So it was a lot going on at the same time there. Then the more formal move into educational technology was a tech fellowship at Baruch college. It was about 2007. I started to again, to follow this recurring theme of overlapping and intertwined part time gigs reinforcing one another. I started as an adjunct in the history department at Baruch.  As a tech fellow, I was supporting faculty and other fellows who are working with faculty and technology in the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, at the time a de facto teaching and learning unit, academic affairs and was operating as a sort of incubator for new instructional technologies. So I was doing the tech support work there, and then I was teaching, and I was able to have some overlap between those two. So that formalized it and then that grew into an educational technology position to bring you up to the present. I left CUNY for four and a half years. I was at Sotheby’s Institute of Art as instructional design role, admin of their learning management system, and came back to CUNY in 2018. and then I started as an instructional designer with a focus on multimedia and then it was during the pandemic that I moved into the Acting Director position and still working with faculty in the instructional design role.

CROOKS: That’s a really helpful overview of your process. What was the adjustment like moving from life as a grad student to the world of work?

HARBISON: I think it was made to at least seem more organic in that I had all those small pieces were kind of rolling along so that I was phased out of grad student life. This was not entirely planned by any means. There was a ramping up as I got over some of the more labor-intensive parts of my studies, got over the hump of completing most of my research and getting past qualifying exams. As I had a little bit more time, I would fill it in with college assistant positions and fellowships and then ended up in short term fellowships. Then the work, especially in faculty support, was ramping up, so I never had a moment where it was, like I did during earlier. I know that transition from graduating from undergraduate and from my master’s program when I switched into teaching from something else, but I can’t even really tell you the moment where I’ve thought I thought of myself as being full time working in in something else. I guess it might be the moment when I realized, especially having little kids, that I didn’t have enough time in the day to keep teaching on the side. That’s when I realized my day job was something that was, had become one thing, as opposed to lots of combinations.

CROOKS: Right, I think that’s something that will resonate with a lot of Grad Center students, is the different projects that we’re working on and the different ways that we’re supporting ourselves as we go through the program.

HARBISON: I never could have planned out the exact way that those opportunities led to the next ones, but I was happy that I took advantage, especially some of those early opportunities like ITP and working with the New Media Lab because then that got the ball rolling. I can remember like Radical History Review. I remember doing a pro-con chart about, well this isn’t going to leave quite as much time to work on my coursework. Yeah, in the end it was a good thing I took it. It ended up opening up a lot of doors. It also opened my eyes up to all the other projects that were going on. For each one of these projects that I joined, it seemed like there were two or more other projects that I heard about. It did come with some costs. There was a fair amount of stress and uncertainty in cobbling together working on two or three projects at the same time, and also working on doing doctoral work, so I should acknowledge that there’s a downside to doing that, as opposed to having one stable fellowship where you’re able to not be pulled in different directions, but overall, it worked for me.

CROOKS: Thinking about your current role, could you tell us what a typical day looks like for you?

HARBISON: Sure. It’s hard not to break it down into pre-pandemic and where we are now. I’ll go with the present, which is somewhat of a hybrid because we are moving away from the emergency mode, I think I might have referenced earlier. We’ve gotten to the point where we have enough of our faculty have foundational expertise working with instructional technology. They have enough experience now that they’ve found their own solutions, or they know who to turn to. They may have found colleagues or friends or family. They’ve come up with a system that works to support the kind of teaching they’re doing now, which in some cases is now face to face. In a lot of cases, it’s still remote, not the number one preference, but there’s enough of a comfort level that there’s not desperation, phone calls, and trying to try to adjust to things. I would break down my day into emailing and zooming with faculty. That’s a good portion of the day, and what that’s about depends on where we are in the term. It might be about designing a course if we are in between or leading up to a session and getting everything set up. Maybe looking for new tools. In that case might be recommending what kind of tools can be used in addition to or in combination with learning management system. If classes have kicked off, it might be troubleshooting why can’t my students see X.  As I mentioned, the E-learning Center also supports students who are working with online technologies. I don’t work directly with students a whole lot, but I do get pulled into some thinking through with the team who’s working with students. As you go through this semester, you get into periods, of course, where there’s a lot of assessment going on and that’s the way the questions will go. Another portion, there’s a good chance I have some kind of collaboration with the Center for Teaching and Learning. It’s CETLS, at BMCC, Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship. The director there Gina Cherry has been an amazing colleague and collaborator in everything professional development that CETLS runs has fit very nicely with the E-learning Center during the pandemic because so much of the professional development is tied into and has needed to be steered toward online and digital. That might entail running workshops or panels where faculty are sharing approaches with one another or looking into tools with one another. That’s part of a typical day.

I would say then the third area would be more strategic thinking, if not daily a weekly basis to give input on working with staff at the college. So that could be leadership on planning for different modalities, working with task forces or committees to meet the needs of students, how to how to find ways to engage students more and boost retention for students and student success. One of the reasons I wanted to come back to CUNY after being away for a few years was I really missed the scale of CUNY and the multi layered system because of all of the networking and collaboration that was possible. So I still work with projects that started at the Graduate Center and continue to be associated with the Graduate Center partly because I know folks who are involved with them, and partly because they’ve matured and reached out to the colleges in ways that it’s a natural fit for the work that I’m doing at BMCC.  It definitely is helpful to hear from other campuses about what they’re doing. Served as a liaison to the School of Professional Studies, has heroically run online teaching essentials, training open to all faculty during the pandemic. It was going on before, but now they’re serving a much larger population. Serving as a liaison to groups like that, to the CUNY Hyflex pilot, which is support for any participating campuses. That group gets together to come up with a plan that’s going to support all the campuses. Being able to hear what other technologists and other faculty and administrators are doing on those kinds of committees is really helpful. I wouldn’t say it’s every day I’m in one of those particular kinds of committees, but I’m in a meeting like that just about every day. Whether that collaboration is going on with something very local at BMCC or something that’s CUNY wide, that varies, which it’s nice variation. Sometimes it can be confusing because there’s a lot of moving parts there. It can be frustrating if there’s not an alignment of what kind of planning is going on one level versus another, but overall, there’s just so much opportunity there to learn new things and plan new things.

CROOKS: You’ve started to touch on this a bit. What do you find rewarding about your work?

HARBISON: In the acting director position, it is still the work with faculty that I get the most out of, and as much as I move into the planning kind of work, I don’t think I’m ever gonna lose that interest in helping to be a partner in designing courses, thinking through everything from troubleshooting the tech in a course to bouncing around ideas about new things to try out, tech or otherwise. So that’s rewarding because I can oftentimes see immediate benefits or gains from that when we think of new ideas and approaches, we can see right away how that’s going to help students at our campus. Related to that would be teaching that goes on in the instructional design work, so the workshopping that we do, the ongoing support. We have faculty hours. At CETLS we have open conversations with faculty who can bring up any topics that they want. That kind of work allows me to continue to do some teaching. It’s been over ten years since I taught undergraduates. I adjuncted for six years at Baruch and I was able to fit that in but then I got to the point, like I said, where I couldn’t fit that in anymore and I’ve missed it ever since. I would say that is a rewarding aspect of the job, is continuing to do the teaching, even though on a day-to-day basis it’s more with faculty and staff, rather than students.

CROOKS: For your return to CUNY for that first position when you came back, what did that job search and interview process look like?

HARBISON: I learned about it not through any inside track. I was searching on Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education. I was looking at Educause, some of the normal lists at the time anyway. The search committee was looking for an understanding of the community college student needs and faculty needs, not strictly in the way where it needed to be an insider from CUNY, but they were looking for, if not experience with our community understanding of it. It was standard from the process that I’ve been involved with. Having been on search committees, it was an interview with the search committee and then second interview with the hiring committee, which is the director at the time of my center and the dean of faculty. And then final interview with the provost. It was pretty straightforward in that there weren’t surprises. The job description was pretty clear about what was being looked for. In this case it’s a bit of a patchwork. Maybe there’s some degree of that in all jobs. This one in particular, being at the intersection of technology and pedagogy and even some other things like curriculum design and working with students. There was some a laundry list section, but it was framed in a way that was pretty clear I think about how they wanted it to all come together.

CROOKS: And for grad students looking to go into this field, what sorts of qualities and skills would you recommend developing?

HARBISON: Specifically, to use my experience as the model, the thing that helped me the most was the technology. I’ve been thinking about how generalizable this is. I don’t think the answer is everybody should rush to infuse technology into whatever research they’re doing or teaching they’re doing just for the sake of getting new things. Part of that is driven by my work as an instructional designer. I lean very heavily toward objective and goal-based implementation of technology, so my philosophy is very much determine your what you’re teaching goals are going to be or your learning goals, your research goals and pull on the technology selectively and deliberately. So it wouldn’t just be blindly rushing out to go get technology. In my case that’s where my interest lay was in trying out some new technologies in my teaching and in the part-time jobs that I was mentioning before and that’s the way that I broadened my experience in addition to everything that I was getting from my program. Thinking more about general lessons from it. Thinking about the present, taking advantage of the resources that are out there for teaching in particular, not to rule out research, but for anyone who’s interested in teaching there are more resources now. Luke Walter founded the Center for Teaching and Learning at the Graduate Center that was after I was there. I could go on to list some other resources that are related to Luke’s work that mean students now have more options for getting information, for researching teaching strategies, for practicing strategies, workshopping, possibly publishing in the scholarship of teaching and learning. That would be an example of broadening experience. It doesn’t have to be tech heavy. These days we’re all using enough tech. The zoom we’re on right now is whether we want to or not we’re all getting that experience. My general advice is take advantage of everything, whether it be new or old, consider all the options that are there at the at the Graduate Center. And they’re probably just one step away from other projects and opportunities that are outside the walls of the Graduate Center.

CROOKS: It sounds like in your time at the Grad Center you really took advantage of a lot of that. I’m wondering if there’s anything looking back you wish you had done differently as a grad student or you realize now oh, if I had done that, that would have made things a bit easier.

HARBISON: I think I would have benefited had I pushed a bit earlier instead of taking the opportunities that I was touching on before one at a time as they came, I could have benefited from finding a mentor earlier on who could help me come up with a more coordinated plan for piecing those things together. That would have taken away some of the uncertainty to my path. I wouldn’t want to have over planned it. I would have missed out on some of the more serendipitous opportunities that I stumbled upon. To think of my teaching as an example. There are more supports now for going into teaching for the first time. I was teaching college for the first time, even though I had that little bit of experience in middle school and student teaching high school. I was not proactive enough in reaching out to the support. There were certainly mentors and there were some structural supports as well. If I was more ahead of things I would have reached out, learned more, and I think that would have accelerated and enriched the experience of bringing together my interests and being a better teacher, meeting the needs of my students at Baruch and that that would have helped. I had my eyes open to what opportunities were there, but I could have been more proactive in reaching out for them.

CROOKS: As a final question, do you have any parting words that you would like to leave with Graduate Center students?

HARBISON: The thing I miss the most about the Grad Center is the community. It was the building. It was having everything so proximate, having all of the special programs and centers and the academic departments, having everything so close together. I miss being able to cross over into different sub communities so easily being in the space. Now today with things being more remote, I’m talking more about the community than the building. I imagine an equivalent of those opportunities is still there, even though it’s a little harder to stumble from one zoom over to another but there are equivalents where there’ll be somebody on your current zoom who will tip you off on something else that’s going on, and the next one. That was the equivalent of one floor up in the Grad Center. That’s what I’m most nostalgic for is having everything so close by in that way. Take advantage of that as much as you can. Well, I’m gonna add onto that. To make it a two-part answer, take advantage of the population density you have in the Grad Center community, albeit in remote forum that density now. But also the distribution you get as you and your classmates go out to the campuses for teaching assignments, fellowships, special projects, whatever, to conferences, whatever is taking you away. At the time, I saw that as an impediment, the need to get on the subway, the equivalent of what would be on a rural campus that would be oh I’ll just be walking from one building to another. Or maybe like a quick bus ride over to another campus if it was a big university. But I have to be on the subway. This is going to take an hour if you include delays. I saw that as a logistical impediment, but there’s something to take advantage there, which is that the different cultures that are on the campuses and the differences in the student bodies of the campuses is something to learn from. So it might just make it worth the extra time on the subway. The pandemic has done strange things, of course, to both time and space, so that jumping from the Grad Center to Baruch to Brooklyn College to BMCC is probably faster now if you can do it digitally. That’s even more reason why I encourage doing it. Take advantage of the fact that digitally you can get from the Grad Center to the other campuses or conferences very, very quickly. And the cultures are still there, so if you digitally participate in events and job opportunities that are the campuses, you’ll be learning different things from the sub communities.

CROOKS: Great That was really helpful and thank you so much for sharing all this with us and joining us today.

HARBISON: Thank you.

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