Fatimah Wirth
Georgia Tech Professional Education

Fatimah Wirth is an Instructional Designer at Georgia Tech Professional Education. She received her doctorate in Instructional Technology from Ohio University in 2005. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “Help Seeking In an Online Environment”. She is an alumnus of Ohio University, University of Washington and Seattle University. She was an ESL instructor at a university in Malaysia for 12 years prior to pursuing her doctoral studies and has taught both face-to-face as well as online courses at Georgia Tech.

As an instructional designer, her knowledge of how students seek help in an online environment garnered from her doctoral research entitled “Help Seeking in an Online Environment” has helped shape and create more robust online courses and more positive learner-based performance outcomes. In 2009, she co-wrote a NASA CAN grant and received the almost $3 million grant to develop certificate programs for middle school STEM teachers. Each certificate program consisted of at least four courses. Fatimah not only developed the NASA ePDN courses as an instructional designer but she also taught as an instructor for one of the NASA ePDN online courses, "Turn Your Classroom Digital".  She taught this course for 3 years from the pilot phase to the implementation phase.  


In addition, she has presented at a number of conferences and has written books as well as ebooks. Last year the book in which she had written a chapter (The MOOC Case Book) won the 2nd place AECT DDL book award. She is also on the Editorial Board of HETL. Her research interests include online education, collaborative online learning, mobile learning, augmented reality in education, gaming in education, simulations in education, pedagogical agents, artificial intelligence and social media in education.

__________
Statement of candidacy:


I have been working with adult learners at the Distance Learning (now known as Georgia Tech Professional Education) department of Georgia Tech for the past nine and a half years. In the time that I have worked there, I have created online courses for faculty as an instructional designer (in Moodle, Sakai, Coursera, Canvas, edX), taught online courses (NASA ePDN (NASA grant), Coursera MOOC) and on campus courses (GT1000. In addition, I have created learning objects using various online tools such as Articulate Storyline, Camtasia, Captivate, etc.

In my many years in Distance Education, I have pushed the envelop in terms of technology and reaching the distance learner through the use of the online tools. My current focus is on engagement and how to get online students to retain knowledge through personalized pathways. With this in mind, I am currently working with a French team to track student activity in an online course. This will done with the use of a software developed by the French team called TraceMe. We have received IRB approval and will launch the software in a course in January 2018. This trace will go beyond the student tracking that is done in the LMS. Every movement of the learner will be traced so that we can learn about where students are getting stuck. Based on the trace, students may be interviewed to find out why they got stuck at certain points and what can be done to improve the student experience.

I am also working on online credentialing by looking into online certificates and badges. This has been a continuous effort since 2009. In addition, I am currently looking at augmented reality and how it can be utilized in the classroom. Furthermore, I am also interested in engaging students through games in education and recently took a workshop in game design and development in Unity.

I believe that as the President of the AECT's Division of Distance Learning, I will be able to inspire members to research, locate and create innovative solutions for a newly evolving networked online learning ecosystem.