3 Questions for Quinnipiac’s Adam Nemeroff

My friend and former Dartmouth colleague Adam Nemeroff is in a leadership role as assistant provost for innovations in learning, teaching and technology at Quinnipiac University. Before I came to Dartmouth in 2007, I worked at Quinnipiac, helping them start their online learning division. So I am especially excited that Adam agreed to share his thoughts and experiences about his position at Quinnipiac and his path to his current leadership role.

 Q: Tell us about your role as assistant provost. How is your role situated within Quinnipiac’s organizational structure? What are your main responsibilities and accountabilities? And what do you find yourself doing most days?

A: I work in the provost’s office team at Quinnipiac with an amazing group of colleagues. We constantly think about how to help students achieve their academic and professional goals and how to support faculty in meeting their needs and advancing in their work as teachers and scholars. My role involves faculty development in teaching, learning design, technology, academic innovation and broader technology initiatives within the academic affairs division.

My career began in learning design and progressed to leading a learning design team. I’ve always been interested in technology and involved in academic technology projects—that’s helped me at various points. My current role in the provost’s team builds on this, almost like imagining what would happen if you put a learning designer in the provost’s office. I love it! I’m a big-idea generator, and that space is great for exploring ambitious and innovative proposals.

My days often involve thinking strategically about the future of teaching and learning at the institution. Now that I have built out a team, I can focus on helping them set our shared goals and be available to support and remove obstacles as needed. As a leader, I see my role in a few different ways. First, I am the champion for the work and the team. I spend a lot of time talking and connecting with people on campus, helping explore new partnerships, linking people with resources, and advancing our team’s overall efforts.

Second, I often think about the role of AI in transforming our learning environment and curriculum. That can range from working with our AI steering committee on strategy and resources for AI on campus to meeting with faculty across our schools and colleges to help them navigate teaching in this new era. The topic of AI is very important to me—I really enjoy thinking about innovation and change. It also helps me keep my learning design and faculty development skills current without overburdening my team.

We have many people doing exciting work with AI in medicine and health professions, business, communications, computing, and the liberal arts. It’s inspiring to hear everyone discuss the potential benefits, uncertainties and fears. Lastly, I find myself helping to center our focus on teaching excellently across all learning modalities, face-to-face and online.

Since we last discussed our job posting for the director of faculty advancement in teaching excellence, we hired Sara Rzeszutek to lead our efforts in teaching excellence, and she’s fantastic! Our new unit, Quinnipiac Innovations in Learning and Technology, is now operational. We are fully staffed with a team of seven—including learning designers, media and technology, and faculty development over all.

Our team collaborates closely and often works together on nearly every project. We decided to switch from Blackboard to Canvas to foster a modern learning environment for our university’s future. Our first courses ran in Canvas this past summer and fall. We recently wrapped up many of our back-end activities, which included weeks of consecutive events and community building. We collaborated to create a new, grant-funded BOBCATS program to help new faculty orient themselves to their roles as teachers and scholars.

Quinnipiac’s strategic strength lies in its dedicated educators across faculty and staff, who continuously support each other in advancing our student-centered mission. We kicked off the Semester Spark event with nearly 100 attendees, who learned, reflected on their teaching, heard from colleagues about classroom innovations and gained inspiration about fostering cultures of academic integrity in the age of AI, featuring a keynote from David Rettinger, co-author of The Opposite of Cheating.

I also had the opportunity to work with Sara Venizian, our new director of the Office of Student Accessibility, on the first in a series of workshops on universal design for learning—one of my favorite aspects of our work! We helped many educators think about their teaching in relation to transitioning to Canvas, and our learning designers are diligently assisting faculty through that process. One week in, things look promising.

Q: What was your educational and professional path that brought you to your current role? Are there particular experiences or challenges that you’ve faced professionally that prepared you for your current work?

A: I attended college as a first-generation student in my family, which shaped much of my understanding and critique of how campuses can best support students. I originally went to school to become a secondary teacher, but I fell in love with exploring the intersection of learning and technology through my courses and my role in student technology support. After that, I got my first job as an instructional designer right out of school. My boss at the time took a chance on a fairly new master’s graduate with minimal experience.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and discussing with others how diverse our backgrounds are when entering this field. Every single designer I’ve met cares deeply about learners as their focus—I even found many other first-generation college students–turned–learning designers. Interestingly, I’m one of the few who started doing this work immediately after college, without a prior career. I hope we begin to see more pathways like that!

This summer, I read The Chief Online Learning Officers’ Guidebook, and I’ve come to realize that there are other ways to enter this work. Besides learning design and technology, I also see enrollment management, business development, faculty experience and academic skills and advising as important feeder areas. My graduate training in education, technology and faculty development has been incredibly helpful in my daily work. Several years ago, I had my first opportunity to teach both in person and online. This is the top recommendation I give to all my team members, especially learning designers. You understand the university differently when you can view it from all perspectives. Additionally, you can build real credibility with your faculty colleagues by sharing a new, innovative or effective practice that you’ve actually tested in your own teaching.

Q: What advice do you have for early and midcareer professionals looking to eventually move into learning and technology leadership roles?

A: Identify potential mentors through formal or informal channels. Take advantage of networking opportunities to connect with people at other institutions involved in the work. Lean into professional networks and seek out leadership development opportunities.

Eight years ago, I participated in the Educause Learning Technologies Leadership Institute, and that group, along with the faculty and alums, was crucial to my own shift in identity toward seeing myself as a leader. I also received incredible support from colleagues in NERCOMP, OLC, the previous edX consortium members and elsewhere.

Gaining experience presenting and building relationships in professional settings at conferences and workshops is valuable. It really helped hone my skills as a public speaker. Quinnipiac offers leadership development training through HR and Lifelong Learning and I’ve been very supportive of my team members pursuing that.

I personally struggled a few years into instructional design and found it challenging to gain traction in the job market. From that experience, I benefited from two key developments that helped me succeed. First, I enhanced my leadership and financial skills by joining my local school board and eventually serving as chair. These roles can provide valuable experience and confidence.

Second, I took a training course offered by the CFO’s office at Dartmouth called Inside Dartmouth’s Budget, which helped me understand some of the core drivers of the higher education financial model. I challenged myself to talk to senior leaders and introduce myself whenever I saw them at social events or the local Starbucks. This helped me break out of my comfort zone and grow. It allows me to connect with leaders as individual people.

Lastly, I believe it’s crucial to talk to your boss about your goals. My boss, colleague and friend at Dartmouth, Erin DeSilva, played a key role in this. I pitched her an idea to create a dedicated team of learning designers within our broader Learning Design and Innovation group, and I developed a rationale for how it would operate and why it could be beneficial. I was very transparent about my observations and analysis. I shared my personal goals in career advancement.

While it might seem unusual for a contributor to take such risks, you need to trust the people you’re working with. If you can’t have that conversation, it’s important to find a place that is willing to engage in it. Making the shift from contributor to manager is very challenging, so it’s essential to seek opportunities to advance where people already know and trust your work. Since that experience, I’ve made it a point as a leader to create career progression paths for my team and to foster opportunities for conversations about growth.