Client Success Manager Story: My Journey from Instructional Design to EdTech

Jessica George, Success Experience Manager, Hypothesis

Drawing upon Robert Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction, instructional designers often envision the learning experience as a journey: a sequence of events during which a learner makes sense of new information well enough to apply it to authentic and real-life scenarios. The path to my current position as Customer Success Manager at Hypothesis has been a similar kind of iterative experience, full of detours and lessons, during which transfer, or, the ability to apply learning to different situations, has played the most important role in terms of my own professional growth.

I first learned about instructional design while exploring career options toward the end of my English PhD program. Having participated in curriculum development and program assessment as an assistant director for my university’s first-year writing program, I was interested in opportunities that would allow me to continue supporting teaching and learning in the college classroom.

Despite the similarities between teaching and instructional design, my professional transition was not straightforward. While continuing to teach college classes, I took a role at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs as a coordinator for a pre-college outreach program. In this position, I managed several undergraduate student employees who served as mentors and coaches for our high school participants. Using instructional design to inform my approaches to training and coaching, I created a workplace centered around project-based learning. After collaboratively establishing learning outcomes for their coaching sessions, these student employees–mostly secondary education majors–worked in teams to create curriculum and instructional materials that would be used to support high school students on their journey to college. As our staff moved fully online at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital annotation became imperative to our professional collaboration. Whether we were revising curriculum and resources for program participants, or exploring ideas and issues related to the first-generation college experience in our community of practice, the ability to add comments and questions to shared files was crucial to our work. 

During this time, I also began a fully online Masters program in Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver. My professors introduced me to Hypothesis as a tool for facilitating asynchronous class discussion. I found that Hypothesis allowed me to connect with my peers in a more conversational way than traditional discussion boards, and I looked forward to assignments that used the tool. After reading Small Teaching Online by Flower Darby with James Lang and Powerful Teaching by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain, I began thinking about social annotation through the lens of learning science, particularly as a method of developing self-efficacy and metacognitive skills, as well as a way of incorporating Universal Design for Learning in the classroom.

A few years later, I took a role as a learning designer for the Colorado Community College System, where I supported online course development and online teaching across the system. I assisted with various system-wide collaborative projects and provided technical and pedagogical guidance to faculty and instructors. Thanks to several state and system-wide grants dedicated to expanding Open Education Resources in Colorado’s community colleges, I learned about Creative Commons licensing and Open Pedagogy by participating in related certificate programs and conferences. Inspired by what I had learned about social annotation as an example of Open Pedagogy, I began integrating social annotation into my online literature courses to increase student engagement and promote student agency. 

Looking to grow professionally, I found my way to Hypothesis, where I rely upon my design knowledge and pedagogical interests to support my work as Customer Success Manager.

Instructional design and customer success are similar in their focus on learner engagement and outcomes. In higher education, the learner can be either the student or the instructor (or both) depending on the scenario. At colleges and universities, instructional designers support effective and meaningful student learning in many ways, often by collaborating with faculty on improving course and program design and providing other kinds of direct pedagogical support, such as training and professional development. Backward design, complemented by Universal Design for Learning and other human-centered design models, played a key role in how I conceptualized classroom learning.

In corporate settings like EdTech, many aspects of instructional design are transferable to the area of customer success. For a company, customers are learners, and those learners can occupy a range of institutional roles. For example, my work involves training not just faculty and instructors who use or are interested in using Hypothesis in their courses, but the several other stakeholders involved in software and technology adoption, such as other instructional designers, technologists, and staff and faculty who support institutional teaching and learning. Drawing upon my previous instructional design experience, my workshops and individual sessions focus not only on the technical aspects of using Hypothesis but also on how the tool can be used to support and enhance existing and emerging pedagogical approaches and practices. My goal is to help faculty confidently use Hypothesis in the classroom in a way that supports learning outcomes and student success and engagement. In terms of Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction, I hope to support knowledge retention and customer transfer in the form of real-life (or, ‘real-classroom’) use of Hypothesis. And while backward design is still critical to how I design training, considerations of learner motivation (such as the ARCS model) are central to my work in customer success.

My circuitous path to my new role as Customer Success Manager has revealed that at heart, I am a lover of learning, and I am grateful for the opportunity to continue supporting faculty and students on their own exciting educational and professional journeys. One of the most rewarding parts of my job is the opportunity to facilitate Hypothesis Academy, where I apply my experience in teaching, instructional design, and customer success to create a collaborative space for new and experienced users of Hypothesis. Participants practice using the tool, discuss its classroom applications, and create activities and assignments that use social annotation, earning a badge at the end of the course. I encourage new and experienced users to join me in our next session, which begins October 1st, 2024 by registering at this link. I look forward to learning with you!