Staff Spotlight: Loren Maria Guay
This month, we’re spotlighting Content Specialist Loren Guay! In the blog post below, Loren tells us more about themself and their work with Distance Learning.
How long have you worked here? How did you come to join the DL team / get involved in distance education?
I joined Distance Learning in March 2022. Before that, I was working as a writing learning specialist at another university; I met with students to improve their writing strategies, supervised a peer writing tutor program, taught workshops, and wore many other hats. Memorably, I built out an online, asynchronous set of Canvas modules as part of our tutor training/CRLA certification program, which was not dissimilar to some of the course design that takes place here at SPS.
I received my degrees in Classics (BA, MPhil, and MA—I’ve read a lot of Greek and Latin!), but I’ve always been passionate about writing and education; alongside my M.A., I also earned a graduate certificate in writing pedagogy, for which my seminars were all about teaching, assessment design, student-centered pedagogy, and so on. After graduating, I spent a while teaching online creative nonfiction courses to middle and high school students. That was my first formal exposure to distance education. Later, this role at NU felt like a natural fit for my interests—a unique combination of editing and writing, course design, and improving student access to higher ed.
Describe your typical “Day in the Life.”
Usually, I receive a course for half or full review and start in with a first “sprint” through the content, editing any grammar/typos and the more easily fixable accessibility issues (e.g., headings, table structure) immediately. Along the way, I’ll note any major issues with accessibility, copyright, or general clarity to address in more detail in a second run-through. As I go, I log every potential issue or recommended major change in a detailed quality review rubric for the instructor and development team to review.
I also spend a lot of time making course materials fully accessible, whether that’s by editing a handout or a slide deck, writing alt text for images, creating text accessible versions of complex graphics, or cleaning up tags in Adobe PDF. When I’m not reviewing courses or working on these materials, I can be found consulting with coworkers on accessibility or copyright; writing content and creating graphics for the department newsletter (yes, I’m interviewing myself here…); or catching up on the latest research about online education and pedagogy.
As pictured above, I can also be found removing my assistant editor, Smilodon (“Milo”) the cat, from my keyboard. He is a tough critic, a connoisseur of forbidden snacks, and a dedicated proponent of the Oxford comma.
What’s something about your job that might surprise readers?
The course review process is much more extensive (both in time and in scope) than a casual onlooker might expect. Accessibility isn’t just about fixing the bare minimum mechanics of a course, like captions and broken links, even though those are extremely important to address. I also watch out for outdated content, potentially harmful language or stereotypes, paywalled/expensive resources, readability issues, tech privacy policies, alignment between various course components, and much more, all of which shape the usability of the course environment and help work towards equity.
What’s your favorite resource or tool that not many people know about?
For digital accessibility, I’m a fan of COBLIS, a free color blindness simulator that allows you to upload an image and test how it may appear to viewers with different types of color-blindness. And, as a humanities scholar at heart, I also have a lot of fun with the Online Etymology Dictionary. I’d love to see more courses incorporate activities that ask students to explore the history of the language used in their fields.
Side-by-side comparison of a traffic light (left) with a simulated view of the same image by someone with red-green colorblindness, produced via COBLIS (right).
Tell us something you’re passionate about.
As a publishing poet and speculative fiction writer, I am passionate about protecting the labor of creatives. Therefore, I have a healthy dose of skepticism about generative AI and other of-the-moment tech darlings that undercut the jobs and scrape the intellectual property of writers and artists in an already predatory industry. As literary magazines close due to their inability to handle the deluge of bad AI-gen submissions, publishers turn to AI-generated book covers instead of paying real designers, and companies replace content jobs with ChatGPT, I believe solidarity with writers requires turning a critical eye on the potential harms of generative AI.
The Distance Learning team is part of the Northwestern School of Professional Studies (SPS). To keep up with news, staff spotlights, online education insights and more, subscribe to the DL newsletter (The DL Digest), follow us on our departmental LinkedIn, and check out the rest of the Distance Learning blog!