We had a session cancellation at the USDLA national conference and I was on the stand-by list to fill in if needed. Sunday evening before the conference, I got a call that I am needed and I say yes. Then I immediately started running… 😂

I run whenever I need to clear my head and think through complex problems. This run was productive and yielded the topic of recruiting online faculty and staff. For the past two years I helped recruit all our online faculty and staff at the College of Online Education, so I had the opportunity to ask myself a number of reflective questions, to experience success and failure, and to learn. This seemed like a great opportunity to give back, so I locked in the topic, drafted the abstract, and then started thinking of which colleagues in my network have expertise with recruiting online faculty and staff and might be interested in this collaboration. A couple of texts later, I had commitments from two co-presenters. A Zoom call later, we had a game plan. Two days later we had our slides, and today we just presented. What a whirlwind journey!

These amazing individuals who jumped to help co-present and share best practives are Kathleen Williams, BA, MSLS, who serves as Life University’s Director of Learning Resources and Peter Enestrom, BA, MBA, who founded Learnexus. We had a blast co-presenting and if you are a USDLA member, you can watch our presentation recording anytime. Thank you, Kate and Pete!

A huge shoutout to the amazing Valary Oleinik, who created all the custom graphics for the conference. She was out for a run when I reached out to her and not even an hour passed before she made and emailed me these graphics for our fill-in presentation, one for Facebook and the other for Twitter. Thank you, Valary!