Fatimah Wirth
Georgia Institute of Technology

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.  

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 designing online courses, she also uses her experience as an instructor for NASA ePDN online course, "Turn Your Classroom Digital". This course was a result of a $3 million NASA grant which she co-wrote and received in 2009. 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 ebooks and an AECT 2nd place award winning peer-reviewed book chapter. Her research interests include online education, collaborative online learning, mobile learning, augmented reality in education, gaming in education, simulations in education, networked online learning and social media in education.

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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 8 years. In the 8 years 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) and Coursera MOOC) and 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, together with my colleagues, I am now 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 just received IRB approval and are currently looking for a couple of courses in the Moodle LMS for a pilot study. 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 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.

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I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.

Best,
Fatimah

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Fatimah Wirth, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer, Professional Education
Georgia Institute of Technology
84 5th St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30308-1031
404-894-8920