Teaching Experience

Dan was led by the Lord to walk through a door in mid 2024 by which he joined Jessup University's Multnomah Campus as an Adjunct Professor. 

His assignment was to teach one class in the fall of 2024: Management Information Systems for the Jessup University School of Business.

What is Management Information Systems?

Think of it as the intersection of business and technology. 

Essentially all businesses in western civilization these days need to have a technology component to succeed at any scale. It's virtually impossible to separate technology and business these days, because technology has become a vital enabler of business in much the same way as paper for bookkeeping and newspaper advertising for marketing/advertisement became bedrock tools of business in earlier times. Those physical/paper tools, of course, have been  largely replaced by now with digital tools. Hence the need to teach business students about managing technology for their businesses, and about using technology to move their businesses forward.

Dan would tell you that this experience - teaching nearly three dozen undergrads  in all four classes - about business and technology has be a most rewarding and also challenging experience. 

Teaching inexperienced college students is quite different than teaching experienced technology professionals. Dan's focus is as much on helping them mature in their thinking as it is on the actual materials being taught - with the hope, of course, that they're better prepared to enter the workplace with a competitive advantage as compared to their peers.

Originally this was to be an in-person class experience and at the last moment it was changed to synchronous online instruction. That alone has added interesting new challenges from the teaching perspective, and Dan is certainly growing as he adapts his teaching skills for that challenge!

Will Dan continue to teach in this capacity beyond Fall 2024?

The Lord knows. He's not worrying too much about that. He's focused on giving his best for the students he has now!

Dan has conducted many sessions in technical conferences (in front of larger audiences) and in classrooms/business conference rooms to teach on the various technologies he represented. This included:

• detailed product architecture and operations teaching - typically on features or product subsystems

• product application teaching - instruction on how to use and integrate the product within a technology ecosystem

• written teaching in the form of white papers

• sales and positioning teaching - what is the product and why would the client care about it?

• development teaching - everything from development methodologies and concepts to best practices to product/subsystem-related matters

• cloud integration teaching - for example, a framework built to use function-as-a-service to implement an Amazon Alex integration for a product

For a couple of years Dan actually headed up the teaching efforts for his set of products at the company's annual technology conference. He oversaw a team of development and business-side contributors from the product organization who put together presentations and presented them at the conference. Dan was responsible for soliciting topics and proposing a list of topics to the company's conference leadership team, setting goals and timelines for development and review of the presentations, ensuring presentation consistency across presentations for the product, etc.

Dan wrote a number of technical papers ("technical collateral") that were published to teach customers how to use technology and integrate it within their environments.

He also produced quite a lot of technical collateral during the years he was in product development - such as documents explaining details relevant to development teams or product management and marketing teams.

In the context of sales, Dan occasionally conducted sessions for his clients to teach on products or technology. At times Dan was the presenter, and at other times he brought in experts to do the teaching.  

He really enjoyed being able to "host" these educational sessions for his clients to give them perspectives on technology that could potentially enhance their environments and their careers, or that would at least expand their perspective to help them approach the needs of their own clients with a greater ability to put together innovative solutions.

What does Dan want to teach?

He's not going to limit the scope of topics he wants to teach... that's something you don't really know until you're presented with the opportunity. Yet what he really wants to do is to be able to teach people things that:

• expand their higher-level understanding of technology and the technology landscape

• bring consideration of proper uses of technology - applying technology with ethical and moral considerations in mind

• help them with "soft skills" (communication, relational skills, etc... these are very important to Dan!)

• help them thrive in business, family, and community settings - things that expand beyond technology and help the whole of the person

Have a need for someone to educate sales teams, clients, product groups, engineers, etc?

Reach out to Dan!