Josh Kim has been appointed to serve as director of digital learning initiatives for the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, Interim Provost Martin Wybourne announced in an email Friday.
Kim will begin Dec. 1 and will be in charge of the development of digital learning programs across the College. His position also includes coordinating these programs among faculty, the College’s various departments and schools and academic computing.
His work in DCAL reflects Hanlon’s goals to increase the use of learning technology in the classroom to help the College remain among elite institutions of higher education. Hanlon specifically cited DCAL in his speech to the faculty this Nov. 4 as the most important place for faculty to receive assistance with incorporating technology in the classroom.
Kim will represent the College in the technology field.
“To the extent that Dartmouth joins partnerships with outside entities that provide an online platform for faculty to engage with students, Josh, along with Alan [Cattier, director of academic and campus technology services], will be the main points of contact,” Anderson said. “They will help interested faculty experiment with technology and fully facilitate its successful use more widely on campus.”
Kim brings experience from his previous role as director of learning of the master’s in healthcare delivery science program, which grants degrees through “hybrid learning” — a combination of online learning and residential periods at the College, one of the first programs of its kind. Kim developed the technology necessary to allow for participants to partake in the online and on-campus courses offered by the program.
Before he was appointed director of digital learning initiatives, Kim belonged to the DCAL executive team.
A presence in the educational technology community, Kim blogs for Inside Higher Ed and has written for U.S. News and World Report’s economic intelligence section and the Forbes India Daily Sabbatical column. A recent column for Inside Higher Ed suggested strategies to work with a learning designer to incorporate technology into the classroom.
When it comes to learning design, attention to practice and theory will provide the most success, Kim wrote in a column.
“It may be that people not formally trained in learning design (such as myself) can pick up enough knowledge and experience to play this role,” he wrote. “The key, I think, is the development of expertise in learning theory and best practices — with expertise in technology important but only within the context of knowledge effective course design methods and pedagogical practices.”
Kim completed his PhD in sociology and demography at Brown University and majored in history at Washington University in St. Louis. He is married to Julie Kim, a pediatric oncologist at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
