I’ve been working in the Academic Technology field for the last twenty years, aiding faculty through significant changes in technologies to deliver content and philosophies on what even should be delivered. And I’ve just finished shepherding my institution from nineteen-and-a-half years of using Blackboard’s course management system (from way back when it was called “CourseInfo” – version 2, to be exact) to now using Instructure’s Canvas system. This most recent leg of my career contains an important point that I wish I could send back to the me of two decades ago:

Train them in the abstract concepts, not the product.

Perhaps I could never have achieved this, since the product used in many (sometimes subtle) ways does influence what content is delivered and in what ways. But after helping hundreds (possibly over a thousand) faculty to construct courses using one particular system, and then seeing the process hundreds just went through in trying to transfer over to using a new system, I feel I’ve done them a disservice.

Of course that’s the advice I’d give past me on behalf of my faculty. The suggestion to myself on behalf of older me is a bit more blunt:

If you aren’t be paid for it, don’t provide it.

Over the years I worked shifts easier measured in days than hours, just to get the systems back up and running. One year, on my anniversary, my wife napped out in the car while I fixed a problem with the course management system servers from before dusk until after one in the morning… and yet somehow I’m still married to the woman. I sometimes share this lesson with others, though I struggle to follow it even to this day: There is no such thing as an academic emergency.

If I’d known then what I know now, I suspect my faculty would be better prepared for the years to come, and I know my health and work/life balance would be better.