With Video, Tech Lead Makes Classes More Valuable
Corinne St. Claire, the assistant director of instructional design & technology for Loyola Law School, and her team live by a simple motto: “If people don’t realize we’ve done anything, we’ve done our jobs well.” St. Claire and her office team provide more than technical and digital support for the entire LLS community; they also work to ensure that both faculty and students have the digital tools they need to succeed academically.
St. Claire concentrates on “flipping the classroom,” or helping professors free up their class time so they can connect more with students and refine the learning process. St. Claire and her team regularly assist professors with creating and curating video materials for lectures—in some cases, faculty will actually conduct lectures entirely via video.
With these visual resources, student can watch a lecture digitally before attending class, and then faculty can use classroom time to answer questions and encourage dialogue. St. Claire and her team maintain the technology, including smart technologies, that allow professors to share their class materials with students. Additionally, her office and the Admissions Department recently started live-streaming Q&A panels with current students, allowing incoming or prospective students the opportunity to ask questions about not only the law school process but also campus life.
St. Claire is always striving to help students connect not only with faculty, but with the school as a whole as well. And beginning with the fall 2016 semester, she took it a step further: She is enrolled in Loyola’s Masters of Science in Legal Studies, focusing on the Specialization in Cybersecurity & Data Privacy Law. Part of her rationale: seeing the classroom firsthand from a student’s perspective. With that information, she hopes to “see from a student’s perspective how we can do more to make their experience a truly positive one,” she said.
At the end of day, St. Claire aims to make students’ lives a little more straightforward. “My role,” she said, “is to help people find the tools they need, and to help people become comfortable with these tools.”