If you’ve attended a professional show or musical recently, chances are you’ve seen virtual set design in action. This approach to stage production has gained so much traction it’s now a staple in the industry. After gaining momentum in professional theater, it has made its way into collegiate performing arts programs and is now emerging in K-12 productions as well.
Virtual set design offers a modern alternative to traditional physical stage sets, using technology and software to create immersive backdrops and environments. This approach unlocks endless creative possibilities for schools while also providing practical advantages.
Here, I’ll delve into three key benefits: increasing student engagement and participation, improving efficiency and flexibility in productions, and expanding educational opportunities.
Increasing student engagement and participation
Incorporating virtual set design into productions gets students excited about learning new skills while enhancing the storytelling of a show. When I first joined Churchill High School in Livonia, Michigan as the performing arts manager, the first show we did was Shrek the Musical, and I knew it would require an elaborate set. While students usually work together to paint the various backdrops that bring the show to life, I wanted to introduce them to collaborating on virtual set design.
We set up Epson projectors on the fly rail and used them to project images as the show’s backdrops. Positioned at a short angle, the projectors avoided any shadowing on stage. To create a seamless image with both projectors, we utilized edge-blending and projection mapping techniques using just a Mac® laptop and QLab software. Throughout the performance, the projectors transformed the stage with a dozen dynamic backdrops, shifting from a swamp to a castle to a dungeon.
Students were amazed by the technology and very excited to learn how to integrate it into the set design process. Their enthusiasm created a real buzz around the production, and the community’s feedback on the final results were overwhelmingly positive.
Improving efficiency and flexibility
During Shrek the Musical, there were immediate benefits that made it so much easier to put together a show. To start, we saved money by eliminating the need to build multiple physical sets. While we were cutting costs on lumber and materials, we were also solving design challenges and expanding what was possible on stage.
This approach also saved us valuable time. Preparing the sets in the weeks leading up to the show was faster, and transitions during performances became seamless. Instead of moving bulky scenery between scenes or acts, the stage crew simply switched out projected images making it much more efficient.
We saw even more advantages in our spring production of She Kills Monsters. Some battle scenes called for 20 or 30 actors to be on stage at once, which would have been difficult to manage with a traditional set. By using virtual production, we broke the stage up with different panels spaced apart and projected designs, creating more space for performers. We were able to save physical space, as well as create a design that helped with stage blocking and made it easier for students to find their spots.
Since using virtual sets, our productions have become smoother, more efficient, and more creative.
Expanding educational opportunities
Beyond the practical benefits, virtual set design also creates valuable learning opportunities for students. Students involved in productions gain exposure to industry-level technology and learn about careers in the arts, audio, and video technology fields. Introducing students to these opportunities before graduating high school can really help prepare them for future success.
Additionally, in our school’s technical theater courses, students are learning lessons on virtual design and gaining hands-on experiences. As they are learning about potential career paths, they are developing collaboration skills and building transferable skills that directly connect to college and career readiness.
Looking ahead with virtual set design
Whether students are interested in graphic design, sound engineering, or visual technology, virtual production brings countless opportunities to them to explore. It allows them to experiment with tools and concepts that connect directly to potential college majors or future careers.
For schools, incorporating virtual production into high school theater offers more than just impressive shows. It provides a cost-effective, flexible, and innovative approach to storytelling. It is a powerful tool that benefits productions, enriches student learning, and prepares the next generation of artists and innovators.
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When I first stepped into my role overseeing student data for the Campbell County School District, it was clear we were working against a system that no longer served us.
At the time, we were using an outdated platform riddled with data silos and manual processes. Creating school calendars and managing student records meant starting from scratch every year. Grade management was clunky, time-consuming, and far from efficient. We knew we needed more than a patchwork fix–we needed a unified student information system that could scale with our district’s needs and adapt to evolving state-level compliance requirements.
Over the past several years, we have made a full transition to digitizing our most critical student services, and the impact has been transformational. As districts across the country navigate growing compliance demands and increasingly complex student needs, the case for going digital has never been stronger. We now operate with greater consistency, transparency, and equity across all 12 of our schools.
Here are four ways this shift has improved how we support students–and why I believe it is a step every district should consider:
How centralized student data improves support across K-12 schools
One of the most powerful benefits of digitizing critical student services is the ability to centralize data and ensure seamless support across campuses. In our district, this has been a game-changer–especially for students who move between schools. Before digitization, transferring student records meant tracking down paper files, making copies, and hoping nothing was lost in the shuffle. It was inefficient and risky, especially for students who required health interventions or academic support.
Now, every plan, history, and record lives in a single, secure system that follows the student wherever they go. Whether a student changes schools mid-year or needs immediate care from a nurse at a new campus, that information is accessible in real-time. This level of continuity has improved both our efficiency and the quality of support we provide. For districts serving mobile or vulnerable populations, centralized digital systems aren’t just convenient–they’re essential.
Building digital workflows for student health, attendance, and graduation readiness
Digitizing student services also enables districts to create customized digital workflows that significantly enhance responsiveness and efficiency. In Campbell County, we have built tools tailored to our most urgent needs–from health care to attendance to graduation readiness. One of our most impactful changes was developing unified, digital Individualized Health Plans (IHPs) for school nurses. Now, care plans are easily accessible across campuses, with alerts built right into student records, enabling timely interventions for chronic conditions like diabetes or asthma. We also created a digital Attendance Intervention Management (AIM) tool that tracks intervention tiers, stores contracts and communications, and helps social workers and truancy officers make informed decisions quickly.
These tools don’t just check boxes–they help us act faster, reduce staff workload, and ensure no student falls through the cracks.
Digitization supports equitable and proactive student services
By moving our student services to digital platforms, we have become far more proactive in how we support students–leading to a significant impact on equity across our district. With digital dashboards, alerts, and real-time data, educators and support staff can identify students who may be at risk academically, socially, or emotionally before the situation becomes critical.
These tools ensure that no matter which school a student attends–or how often they move between schools–they receive the same level of timely, informed support. By shifting from a reactive to a proactive model, digitization has helped us reduce disparities, catch issues early, and make sure that every student gets what they need to thrive. That’s not just good data management–it’s a more equitable way to serve kids.
Why digital student services scale better than outdated platforms
One of the most important advantages of digitizing critical student services is building a system that can grow and evolve with the district’s needs. Unlike outdated platforms that require costly and time-consuming overhauls, flexible digital systems are designed to adapt as demands change. Whether it’s integrating new tools to support remote learning, responding to updated state compliance requirements, or expanding services to meet a growing student population, a digitized infrastructure provides the scalability districts need.
This future-proofing means districts aren’t locked into rigid processes but can customize workflows and add modules without disrupting day-to-day operations. For districts like ours, this adaptability reduces long-term costs and supports continuous improvement. It ensures that as challenges evolve–whether demographic shifts, policy changes, or new educational priorities–our technology remains a reliable foundation that empowers educators and administrators to meet the moment without missing a beat.
Digitizing critical student services is more than a technical upgrade–it’s a commitment to equity, efficiency, and future readiness. By centralizing data, customizing workflows, enabling proactive support, and building scalable systems, districts can better serve every student today and adapt to whatever challenges tomorrow may bring.
Sara Douglas, Campbell County Schools
Sara Douglas is the District Data Leader for Campbell County Schools in Jacksboro, Tennessee.
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When I first started experimenting with AI in my classroom, I saw the same thing repeatedly from students. They treated it like Google. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. It didn’t take long to realize that if my students only engage with AI this way, they miss the bigger opportunity to use AI as a partner in thinking. AI isn’t a magic answer machine. It’s a tool for creativity and problem-solving. The challenge for us as educators is to rethink how we prepare students for the world they’re entering and to use AI with curiosity and fidelity.
Moving from curiosity to fluency
In my district, I wear two hats: history teacher and instructional coach. That combination gives me the space to test ideas in the classroom and support colleagues as they try new tools. What I’ve learned is that AI fluency requires far more than knowing how to log into a platform. Students need to learn how to question outputs, verify information and use results as a springboard for deeper inquiry.
I often remind them, “You never trust your source. You always verify and compare.” If students accept every AI response at face value, they’re not building the critical habits they’ll need in college or in the workforce.
To make this concrete, I teach my students the RISEN framework: Role, Instructions, Steps, Examples, Narrowing. It helps them craft better prompts and think about the kind of response they want. Instead of typing “explain photosynthesis,” they might ask, “Act as a biologist explaining photosynthesis to a tenth grader. Use three steps with an analogy, then provide a short quiz at the end.” Suddenly, the interaction becomes purposeful, structured and reflective of real learning.
AI as a catalyst for equity and personalization
Growing up, I was lucky. My mom was college educated and sat with me to go over almost every paper I wrote. She gave me feedback that helped to sharpen my writing and build my confidence. Many of my students don’t have that luxury. For these learners, AI can be the academic coach they might not otherwise have.
That doesn’t mean AI replaces human connection. Nothing can. But it can provide feedback, ask guiding questions, and provide examples that give students a sounding board and thought partner. It’s one more way to move closer to providing personalized support for learners based on need.
Of course, equity cuts both ways. If only some students have access to AI or if we use it without considering its bias, we risk widening the very gaps we hope to close. That’s why it’s our job as educators to model ethical and critical use, not just the mechanics.
Shifting how we assess learning
One of the biggest shifts I’ve made is rethinking how I assess students. If I only grade the final product, I’m essentially inviting them to use AI as a shortcut. Instead, I focus on the process: How did they engage with the tool? How did they verify and cross-reference results? How did they revise their work based on what they learned? What framework guided their inquiry? In this way, AI becomes part of their learning journey rather than just an endpoint.
I’ve asked students to run the same question through multiple AI platforms and then compare the outputs. What were the differences? Which response feels most accurate or useful? What assumptions might be at play? These conversations push students to defend their thinking and use AI critically, not passively.
Navigating privacy and policy
Another responsibility we carry as educators is protecting our students. Data privacy is a serious concern. In my school, we use a “walled garden” version of AI so that student data doesn’t get used for training. Even with those safeguards in place, I remind colleagues never to enter identifiable student information into a tool.
Policies will continue to evolve, but for day-to-day activities and planning, teachers need to model caution and responsibility. Students are taking our lead.
Professional growth for a changing profession
The truth of the matter is most of us have not been professionally trained to do this. My teacher preparation program certainly did not include modules on prompt engineering or data ethics. That means professional development in this space is a must.
I’ve grown the most in my AI fluency by working alongside other educators who are experimenting, sharing stories, and comparing notes. AI is moving fast. No one has all the answers. But we can build confidence together by trying, reflecting, and adjusting through shared experience and lessons learned. That’s exactly what we’re doing in the Lead for Learners network. It’s a space where educators from across the country connect, learn and support one another in navigating change.
For educators who feel hesitant, I’d say this: You don’t need to be an expert to start. Pick one tool, test it in one lesson, and talk openly with your students about what you’re learning. They’ll respect your honesty and join you in the process.
Preparing students for what’s next
AI is not going away. Whether we’re ready or not, it’s going to shape how our students live and work. That gives us a responsibility not just to keep pace with technology but to prepare young people for what’s ahead. The latest futures forecast reminds us that imagining possibilities is just as important as responding to immediate shifts.
We need to understand both how AI is already reshaping education delivery and how new waves of change will remain on the horizon as tools grow more sophisticated and widespread.
I want my students to leave my classroom with the ability to question, create, and collaborate using AI. I want them to see it not as a shortcut but as a tool for thinking more deeply and expressing themselves more fully. And I want them to watch me modeling those same habits: curiosity, caution, creativity, and ethical decision-making. Because if we don’t show them what responsible use looks like, who will?
The future of education won’t be defined by whether we allow AI into our classrooms. It will be defined by how we teach with it, how we teach about it, and how we prepare our students to thrive in a world where it’s everywhere.
Ian McDougall, Yuma Union High School District
Ian McDougall is a history teacher and edtech coach at Yuma Union High School District in Arizona. He also facilitates the Lead for Learners Community, an online hub for learner-centered educators nationwide. With extensive experience in K–12 education and technology integration, Ian supports schools in adopting innovative practices through professional development and instructional coaching. He holds a master’s degree in United States history from Adams State University, further strengthening his expertise as both a teacher and coach.
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AI is now at the center of almost every conversation in education technology. It is reshaping how we create content, build assessments, and support learners. The opportunities are enormous. But one quiet risk keeps growing in the background: losing our habit of critical thinking.
I see this risk not as a theory but as something I have felt myself.
The moment I almost outsourced my judgment
A few months ago, I was working on a complex proposal for a client. Pressed for time, I asked an AI tool to draft an analysis of their competitive landscape. The output looked polished and convincing. It was tempting to accept it and move on.
Then I forced myself to pause. I began questioning the sources behind the statements and found a key market shift the model had missed entirely. If I had skipped that short pause, the proposal would have gone out with a blind spot that mattered to the client.
That moment reminded me that AI is fast and useful, but the responsibility for real thinking is still mine. It also showed me how easily convenience can chip away at judgment.
AI as a thinking partner
The most powerful way to use AI is to treat it as a partner that widens the field of ideas while leaving the final call to us. AI can collect data in seconds, sketch multiple paths forward, and expose us to perspectives we might never consider on our own.
In my own work at Magic EdTech, for example, our teams have used AI to quickly analyze thousands of pages of curriculum to flag accessibility issues. The model surfaces patterns and anomalies that would take a human team weeks to find. Yet the real insight comes when we bring educators and designers together to ask why those patterns matter and how they affect real classrooms. AI sets the table, but we still cook the meal.
There is a subtle but critical difference between using AI to replace thinking and using it to stretch thinking. Replacement narrows our skills over time. Stretching builds new mental flexibility. The partner model forces us to ask better questions, weigh trade-offs, and make calls that only human judgment can resolve.
Habits to keep your edge
Protecting critical thinking is not about avoiding AI. It is about building habits that keep our minds active when AI is everywhere.
Here are three I find valuable:
1. Name the fragile assumption Each time you receive AI output, ask: What is one assumption here that could be wrong? Spend a few minutes digging into that. It forces you to reenter the problem space instead of just editing machine text.
2. Run the reverse test Before you adopt an AI-generated idea, imagine the opposite. If the model suggests that adaptive learning is the key to engagement, ask: What if it is not? Exploring the counter-argument often reveals gaps and deeper insights.
3. Slow the first draft It is tempting to let AI draft emails, reports, or code and just sign off. Instead, start with a rough human outline first. Even if it is just bullet points, you anchor the work in your own reasoning and use the model to enrich–not originate–your thinking.
These small practices keep the human at the center of the process and turn AI into a gym for the mind rather than a crutch.
Why this matters for education
For those of us in education technology, the stakes are unusually high. The tools we build help shape how students learn and how teachers teach. If we let critical thinking atrophy inside our companies, we risk passing that weakness to the very people we serve.
Students will increasingly use AI for research, writing, and even tutoring. If the adults designing their digital classrooms accept machine answers without question, we send the message that surface-level synthesis is enough. We would be teaching efficiency at the cost of depth.
By contrast, if we model careful reasoning and thoughtful use of AI, we can help the next generation see these tools for what they are: accelerators of understanding, not replacements for it. AI can help us scale accessibility, personalize instruction, and analyze learning data in ways that were impossible before. But its highest value appears only when it meets human curiosity and judgment.
Building a culture of shared judgment
This is not just an individual challenge. Teams need to build rituals that honor slow thinking in a fast AI environment. Another practice is rotating the role of “critical friend” in meetings. One person’s task is to challenge the group’s AI-assisted conclusions and ask what could go wrong. This simple habit trains everyone to keep their reasoning sharp.
Next time you lean on AI for a key piece of work, pause before you accept the answer. Write down two decisions in that task that only a human can make. It might be about context, ethics, or simple gut judgment. Then share those reflections with your team. Over time this will create a culture where AI supports wisdom rather than diluting it.
The real promise of AI is not that it will think for us, but that it will free us to think at a higher level.
The danger is that we may forget to climb.
The future of education and the integrity of our own work depend on remaining climbers. Let the machines speed the climb, but never let them choose the summit.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Dr. Adam Goodcoff | Photos courtesy of MedFluencers
Influencer and emergency medicine physician Dr. Adam Goodcoff shares insights on embracing AI and evolving career pathways to help healthcare professionals stay adaptable and future-ready.
As someone who has successfully merged clinical practice with digital innovation, how do you believe emerging healthcare professionals can best position themselves to thrive in this evolving landscape?
I think the best thing someone who’s coming up or even someone actively practicing now could do is keep an open mind and have a hunger for new skills and knowledge. Look at the way machine learning has come into our lives in the last two or three years. If you had asked a clinician three years ago if they found AI helpful, I don’t think they could even tell you where AI was in the mix. Today, there are tools like the ambient AI scribes and various platforms that are now making their way into healthcare. We need to have hunger and interest in the discovery of these new tools and consider how we could integrate them into our day-to-day workflow. I think having an open mind is the best way to do that.
What key skills or mindsets do you think are essential for those entering healthcare today?
I think the mindset is really one of growth and opportunity. We’re entering a really interesting era, as I mentioned, with AI and medicine and tech enabling the workforce for healthcare providers. Even five years ago, it was an analog specialty. I mean, we were interacting with computers and using some dictation software, but nothing really advanced. In that short time span, we’ve accelerated that so much already.
What I would say to the learners and those coming into this career is to be hungry and be open to change. Medicine is well known for being slow to change and slow to adopt, and there are reasons for that; there’s safety and security in the way that we’ve done things. However, now at a time when innovation is so rapid, I think it’s important to consider the ways we might be able to integrate that into our workflow.
Can you share some examples of how social media and digital platforms have created new career pathways within healthcare that might not have existed a decade ago?
I think the beauty around social media in healthcare is that we’ve now created an opportunity to educate our peers and patients in a direct-to-consumer space in a way that is faster and more direct than ever before. It’s really democratized health education. I think it’s an exciting time where real value can be brought and exchanged on social platforms.
Healthcare workforce shortages are a pressing concern. How can innovative career models like those involving digital health communication help address these gaps while also enhancing patient care?
I’d be a bit biased answering this, but I think social media brings visibility to healthcare careers and brings some of the fun and discovery back into a career in healthcare. We have physicians and folks of all degrees really showing what life can be like in various career pathways. I found a lot of success in my own content by creating ways for learners to engage and test their skills and to feel rewarded in a friendly learning environment, where there was no pressure to formally study. That’s what we see at MedFluencers: These physicians and healthcare professionals are excited about reaching the next generation of learners, driving the adoption of new technologies and therapies faster, and getting that information in the right hands.
Looking forward, what trends or opportunities do you foresee that healthcare students should be preparing for to maximize their impact and career satisfaction?
I think healthcare careers are changing. From a technology side, there’s tremendous enablement, but also the way that the healthcare system works is constantly evolving. There are certainly things about the system that are broken, but there are things that are being fixed, and I think that goes back to my concept of keeping an open mind and being fluid or open to change around the way that a career looks. When I was in high school and thinking about being a physician, it’s different today than it was then. In an equal amount of time, it will be radically different again. We’re at such a quick evolutionary pace here.
I’d invest in your own learning, especially understanding a bit more about machine learning and AI. I think it’s become a part of all of our lives, and there are so many folks who just quickly label it AI and write it off. What is the AI doing? Why is it different than traditional search? What are we doing differently with these tools?
K-12 IT leaders are under pressure from all sides–rising cyberattacks, the end of Windows 10 support, and the need for powerful new learning tools.
The good news: Windows 11 on Lenovo devices delivers more than an upgrade–it’s a smarter, safer foundation for digital learning in the age of AI.
Delaying the move means greater risk, higher costs, and missed opportunities. With proven ROI, cutting-edge protection, and tools that empower both teachers and students, the case for Windows 11 is clear.
1. Harness AI-powered educational innovation with Copilot Windows 11 integrates Microsoft Copilot AI capabilities that transform teaching and learning. Teachers can leverage AI for lesson planning, content creation, and administrative tasks, while students benefit from enhanced collaboration tools and accessibility features.
2. Combat the explosive rise in school cyberattacks The statistics are alarming: K-12 ransomware attacks increased 92 percent between 2022 and 2023, with human-operated ransomware attacks surging over 200 percent globally, according to the 2024 State of Ransomware in Education.
3. Combat the explosive rise in school cyberattacks Time is critically short. Windows 10 support ended in October 2025, leaving schools running unsupported systems vulnerable to attacks and compliance violations. Starting migration planning immediately ensures adequate time for device inventory, compatibility testing, and smooth district-wide deployment.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
In today’s connected world, school safety extends far beyond hallways. Experts highlight how to protect students through cybersecurity, digital literacy, and trust-centered policies.
Safety starts with digital literacy
For schools today, safety means more than locked doors. In an era where student data is currency and misinformation spreads at viral speed, digital security has become just as critical as physical protection.
Megan Derrick, Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Florida and instructional designer at Hillsborough College, identifies “two big red flags: data privacy and misinformation. Hackers love student data, and AI makes fake news spread faster than a viral TikTok.” For her, protecting schools requires both strong cybersecurity systems and teaching students to be critical consumers of information.
But safety isn’t only technical. “True protection is both technical and human,” says Yanbei Chen, a doctoral researcher at Syracuse University. Her work emphasizes combining infrastructure with education in digital citizenship, so students and teachers feel safe engaging with technology.
Both Derrick and Chen agree that digital literacy should be integrated across subjects, not siloed into a single workshop. “Students should know how to fact-check a source and avoid clicking on emails that promise free AirPods,” Derrick says. Chen adds that administrators and teachers can model responsible online behavior, weave discussions of privacy and bias into lessons, and provide opportunities for students to practice safe decision-making.
Safety ensures trust and resilience
Balancing safety with openness remains a key challenge. Derrick emphasizes the role of transparency: “Policies should not feel like surveillance. They should feel supportive.” When students and teachers understand the reasons behind safeguards, collaborative and creative learning can thrive within secure boundaries.
Looking ahead, emerging technologies and stronger policies offer hope. Transparent data practices, inclusive design, and human-centered AI can help schools build environments that are both innovative and resilient.
As Chen puts it, “Digital literacy and cybersecurity are not just technical skills — they’re part of preparing students to be thoughtful, ethical participants in a digital society.”
In short, protecting schools in the digital age means equipping students and educators not only to avoid risks but to thrive. That requires blending strong safeguards with a culture of trust, transparency, and resilience.
Across the UK, millions of people struggle to prove what they’re capable of. From students juggling part-time work, to graduates volunteering in their communities, much of their learning sits outside formal qualifications and is effectively invisible to employers and institutions.
That invisibility costs everyone. It holds back individuals who can’t evidence their abilities and employers who struggle to identify the right talent, and it also drags on national productivity.
Last month the RSA and Ufi VocTech Trust published the final report of the Digital Badging Commission, From Skills to Growth: A Plan for Digital Badging in the UK. The conclusion is clear: the UK urgently needs a national digital skills wallet, linked to emerging plans for a national digital ID and built on open, interoperable standards. It would allow people to collect, store and share digital badges and credentials for their skills and capabilities that sit alongside their formal qualifications for a more holistic approach to education.
This recommendation now aligns directly with the UK government’s post-16 education and skills white paper which commits to a digital-first, lifelong learning system and the development of a national digital identity infrastructure. The commission’s proposals are therefore timely, practical and well placed to support the government’s agenda.
The missing infrastructure
While individual institutions issue transcripts in pdf format, and some pioneer digital badges alongside them, there’s no shared infrastructure to make those records connected nor visible across different sectors. As education and work become increasingly digital, paper certificates should be giving way to verifiable, portable digital records, alongside digital badges and credentials.
These are not just icons of achievement, but verified records embedded with information about who issued them, what they recognise and when they were awarded. Built on open standards, they can be issued by any organisation that follows the same open technical framework, ensuring compatibility across sectors.
Globally, digital badges and credentials are part of richer digital profile infrastructures, including Comprehensive Learner Records (CLRs) and Learning and Employment Records (LERs). CLRs capture academic, professional and co-curricular achievements, while LERs extend this to employment history, creating a portfolio of verified experience. Both can be stored in digital wallets, secure platforms that give individuals control over how and when they share their data with employers or education providers.
Together, these systems represent a shift towards lifelong, learner-owned digital records, combining qualifications, skills and experience into one trusted framework. This is precisely the direction outlined in the government’s white paper, which calls for a more joined-up and data-driven post-16 education landscape.
The Digital Badging Commission’s modelling shows that a trusted digital credentialing ecosystem could unlock billions in productivity across the wider economy through faster hiring and retention. But the gains go deeper than economics: visibility of skills drives inclusion. It means every learner, whatever their route, can have their capabilities recognised.
Keeping up with global trends
The use of digital skills wallets and LERs is accelerating worldwide. In the UK, the idea of a skills passport is not new – in 2022, the Council of Skills Advisers, chaired by David Blunkett, proposed a Learning and Skills Passport, a modular, assessment-based record built over a lifetime, linked to Individual Learning Accounts. More recently, under the industrial strategy, government confirmed that Skills England will work with industry to develop such passports.
Across Europe, the EU’s Digital Identity Wallet is being piloted in several member states ahead of full rollout in 2026. It will let citizens store and share verified digital credentials, from qualifications to identity documents, through a secure mobile app integrated with Europass. The system aims to make skills and qualifications transferable across borders, supporting the EU’s vision for a flexible, skills-based digital economy.
The Digital Badging Commission is calling for interoperable skills wallets that begins as an evolution of the Department for Education’s digital Education Record (which will be rolled out to all school pupils from August 2026). It will initially hold GCSEs for school-leavers but could expand to become a lifelong, portable record – potentially linking to whatever comes out of emerging plans for a national digital ID.
Here the white paper is welcome but incomplete. It describes an “education record app” focused on qualifications and support information, yet it does not set out how essential, non-accredited learning (workplace skills, volunteering, micro-credentials) will be imported. To avoid a two-tier system, the government should seize the chance to ensure one integrated wallet – rather than a separate “skills app” – so a person’s full skillset is represented, not just formal assessments. Not only that, but individuals should be able to choose what they share, and with whom.
This directly complements the white paper’s ambition for a unified skills and qualifications framework, ensuring that learning follows the individual, not the institution, across life and work.
Crucially, it must adopt open standards so that every education provider can issue records that align with it, and can be exported into a shared national wallet or interoperable proprietary ones. Degree transcripts from universities would no longer be in pdf format, but living records exported to the same technical rules as other credentials. A learner could move a verified transcript directly into a skills and qualifications wallet, combine it with badges from professional training or volunteering, and share it securely with employers anywhere in the UK.
That interoperability matters. Without it, the Education Record risks excluding lifelong learning altogether. With it, we can create a single, trusted architecture connecting higher education, workplace learning and civic participation. For universities, it means the qualifications they issue remain visible and valuable in a joined-up system.
What higher education stands to gain
There’s a strategic choice here. Universities can either wait until government or private platforms dictate the standards or help design them now.
By engaging early, HEIs can enhance their reputation and competitiveness by being seen as innovators in trusted digital credentials. This will strengthen their global profile and appeal to learners and employers seeking transparent, skills-focused education. They can provide better learner outcomes by meaningfully capturing students’ broader skills, placements and co-curricular learning, improving employability and lifelong learning pathways – taking the former Higher Education Achievement Record to its natural digital conclusion, and making lifelong learning tangible, rather than rhetorical, to students. Moreover, early involvement will mean a smoother integration with existing systems (VLEs and student records), reducing future compliance costs and avoiding disruptive retrofitting when standards are mandated.
The post-16 white paper’s call for a coherent digital skills framework reinforces this opportunity for universities to lead, not follow, in shaping the standards and technology that will define post-16 learning.
The obvious concerns are trust, quality and cost. Without consistent quality assurance, digital credentials risk being untrusted markers of skill. That’s why the Commission also calls for a national registry for digital credential quality assurance – a registry that defines standards, metadata requirements and approved issuers.
Quality is not the enemy of flexibility in this case; it is the enabler of trust. If universities lead in shaping these standards, they can ensure rigour and learner protection are built in from the start.
Adopting open standards in education and digital skills systems will not necessarily be straightforward, particularly in environments where legacy systems have been modified incrementally over years. For many institutions, both large and small, modifying student information systems and integrating open standards to bring them into line will require significant overhaul of systems, as well as underpinning investment in staff training.
However, the implementation of the LLE is requiring all institutions to explore the extent to which their student record systems are fit for purpose, and this represents a real opportunity to think broadly about what systems will be required in the future.
A call to lead, not follow
The RSA once helped invent the modern exam system. Today we need the same leap of imagination for the digital age. If we want an inclusive, high-trust and high-skill economy, recognition must catch up with reality.
Universities are uniquely placed to lead this transition, rooted in evidence, trusted by learners and central to the national conversation about growth. The question is not whether digital credentials will become part of our landscape, but who will set the standards and values that shape them.
By engaging with open standards for degree transcripts and flexing VLEs to deliver digital badges, higher education can ensure that the national digital skills wallet reflects academic quality, learner autonomy and social purpose. In the wake of the government’s post-16 white paper – and with clarity now needed on integrating non-accredited learning – the timing could not be better. It’s an opportunity to turn invisible learning into visible value.
For early-career researchers (ECRs), building a digital research space can feel like another burden piled onto an already demanding schedule. The idea of online professional networking often evokes images of overwhelming social media feeds and self-promoting influencers.
Yet ECRs face a significant risk by solely relying on institutional platforms for their digital footprint: information portability. While university websites offer high visibility as trusted sources, most ECRs on short-term contracts lose web and email access as soon as their contracts expire. This often forces a hasty rebuild of their online presence precisely when they need to navigate critical career transitions.
Having worked with doctoral and postdoctoral candidates across Europe, common initial hesitations to establishing a digital research space include: uncertainty about how and where to start, discouragement from senior researchers who dismiss digital networks as not “real” work, fears of appearing boastful and/or the paralyzing grip of impostor syndrome. Understanding these hesitations, I emphasize in my coaching the ways that building a digital research space is a natural extension of ECRs’ professional growth.
Why a Strategic Digital Research Space Matters
A proactive, professional digital strategy offers several key advantages.
Enhancing visibility and discoverability: A well-curated, current, consistent and coherent digital presence significantly improves discoverability for peers, potential collaborators, future employers, funders, journal editors and the media.
Networking: Strategically using digital platforms transcends institutional and geographical boundaries, enabling connections with specific individuals, research groups and relevant industry contacts globally.
Showcasing expertise and impact: Your digital space allows you to present a holistic view of your contributions beyond publications, including skills, ongoing projects, presentations, teaching, outreach and broader impacts.
Meeting communication expectations: As research advances, particularly with public funding, the demand to communicate findings beyond academic circles increases. Funders, institutions and the public expect researchers to demonstrate broader impact and societal relevance and a strategic digital presence provides effective channels for these crucial communications.
Controlling your narrative: Actively shape your professional identity and how your expertise is perceived, rather than relying on fragmented institutional profiles or database entries.
Ensuring information portability and longevity: Platforms like LinkedIn, ORCID, Google Scholar or a personal website ensure your professional identity, network and achievements remain consistent, accessible and under your control throughout your career.
Getting Started: Choosing Your Digital Network Combination
The goal isn’t to be online everywhere, but to be online strategically. Select a platform combination and engagement style aligned with your specific objectives and target audience, considering the time you have available.
Different platforms serve distinct strategic aims and audiences at various research stages. Categorizing digital platforms into three subspaces helps map the landscape and can help you develop a more balanced presence across the research cycle.
First, identify the primary strategic goal(s): public dissemination, professional networking expansion or deeper engagement within your academic niche? Your answer will guide your platform selection, as you aim for eventual presence in each space.
Figure 1: Align your digital platform choices with your strategic goals and target audience.
Next, consider your audience spectrum. Effective research communication depends on understanding your target audience and their needs.
Scholarly discourse: At the outset of your career, specialized academic platforms like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, institutional repositories and reference managers with social features (e.g., Mendeley) are key for engaging directly with peers. Foundational permanent identifiers like ORCID are crucial for tracking outputs across systems.
Professional network: As you seek to develop your career, LinkedIn, Google (including Google Scholar) and X (formerly Twitter) are vital hubs across academia, industry and related sectors.
Share for impact: TikTok, Facebook and Instagram excel for broader dissemination. Do adjust style and tone: While academics can process jargon and complex concepts, a broader audience will engage more in plain English.
A strong, time-efficient and pragmatic starting point is to create a free and unique researcher identifier number like an ORCID, develop a professional LinkedIn profile and engage with a relevant academic platform (this would be in addition to your presence on a university or lab website). Because the ORCID requires no upkeep and a LinkedIn profile can leverage existing institutional and biographical information, with this combination ECRs can quickly establish a solid foundation for gradual digital expansion over the medium term.
Make It Manageable: Time, Engagement and Content
Once the platform combination is in place, effective digital management requires balancing three core elements: time, engagement and content.
Figure 2. Key considerations for a sustainable digital networking strategy: balancing realistic time investment, meaningful engagement and appropriate content types.
Time Investment
Key message: Prioritize consistency over quantity.
Focused engagement: Allocate short, regular blocks (e.g., 15 to 30 minutes weekly) for specific activities like checking discussions, sharing updates or thoughtful commenting between periods of focused research.
Platform nuance: Invest strategically, recognizing that platforms have different tempos and life spans (e.g., a LinkedIn post typically has a longer life span than an X post).
Campaign bursts: Plan ahead to strategically increase activity around key events like publications or conferences, utilizing scheduling tools for automated posting.
Content cadence: Consistency beats constant noise, so plan a realistic posting schedule such as once a month.
Engagement
Key message: Focus on short but regular efforts.
Active participation: Move beyond passive consumption by commenting, sharing relevant work and asking insightful questions.
Build relationships: Genuine interaction fosters trust and meaningful connections.
Monitor your impact (optional): Use platform analytics to understand what resonates and refine your strategy.
Content Type
Key message: Your hard work should work hard online.
Written: Summaries, insights, blog posts, threads, articles.
Visual: Infographics, diagrams, cleared research images, presentation slides.
Multimedia: Short explanatory videos, audio clips, recorded talks.
Cross-post: Share content across all relevant platforms (e.g., post your YouTube video on LinkedIn and ResearchGate).
Overcoming Reluctance
If you’re hesitant, consider these starting points:
Start small, stay focused: Choose one or two platforms aligned with your top priority. Master these before expanding.
Embrace learning: Your initial digital content may not be perfect, but consistent practice leads to significant improvement. Give yourself permission to progress.
Integrate, don’t isolate: Weave digital engagement into your research workflow. Share insights from webinars or interesting papers with your network.
Give and take: Focus on offering value by sharing insights, asking stimulating questions and amplifying others’ work. Reciprocity fuels networking.
Set boundaries: Protect your deep work time. Schedule dedicated slots for digital engagement during lower-energy periods and manage notifications wisely.
Be patient: Recognize that building meaningful networks and visibility is a long-term career investment.
Your Digital Research Space: A Career Asset
A strategic digital research space is essential for navigating and succeeding in a modern research career. A thoughtful approach empowers you to control your professional narrative, build lasting networks, meet communication expectations and ensure your valuable contributions are both visible and portable.
Maura Hannon is based in Switzerland and has more than two decades of expertise in strategic communication and thought leadership positioning. She has worked extensively for the last 10 years with doctoral and postdoctoral candidates across Europe to help them build strategies that harness digital networks to enhance their research visibility and impact.
What can academic writers do to have a digital presence that shares their writing and helps them connect with people online? Dr. Katy Peplin interviews The Social Academic podcast host, Jennifer van Alstyne in honor of Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) in November.
Timestamps
0:00 Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) with Dr. Katy Peplin and Jennifer van Alstyne 2:28 Your online presence is more than just social media 5:02 Cultivating authentic connections online for graduate students and faculty 10:18 Overcoming imposter syndrome and the lasting impact of sharing your story 14:56 Safety and community building online for academics and researchers 22:39 Jennifer van Alstyne’s tips for your personal academic website or research lab website 31:20 Did your university offer you a website? Yay. Keep this in mind 36:44 Aligning your online presence with your personal and professional goals 39:52 Your impact, your writing, your academic life matters 45:17 Build confidence by being intentional about how you show up online 49:09 Increase your impact with strategic approaches to your online presence
Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo)
Jennifer van Alstyne: Yay. I am so excited to talk about academic writing today because this is honestly a love of mine and I don’t do it anymore, but I help academic writers all the time with their online presence. I’m really focused on the digital side. Today I have Dr. Katy Peplin from Thrive PhD, and she’s going to ask me questions for academic writers because next month is academic writing month. Well, before we get to the questions, tell us a little bit about amo.
Katy Peplin, PhD: Okay, so I’m so excited here, but AcWriMo, which is so much more fun to write than it is to say, but is a National Novel Writing Month, which is a sort of longstanding decades old internet tradition at this point where people sign up and try and write 10,000 words of a novel draft in the month of November. There had long been sort of a community around novel writing in that way. Starting the origins of it now are sort of lost to the miss of internet time, but academics have been jumping onto it. I’ve been doing programming for this since 2018, which is quite a few years ago now. But I am really excited because the kind of way that we do it in the Thrive PhD universe, and now I have this great collaborator, Dr. Kate Henry, but we really believe in sort of building a writing practice.
Not necessarily belting yourself to your chair until you write that journal article or that chapter, but thinking about this as a month to intentionally touch in with your writing, touch in with your projects, experiment with things, and build some awareness around that writing practice. Let’s face it, November is the time where the end of the year looms closer and closer. All of these things that felt really far away in September or July when you’re like, “Sure, I’ll have that done by the end of the year,” suddenly become very real at the same time that semesters end and holiday stuff ramps up. Human things are so complicated. And, at least where I am in the northern hemisphere, the daylight goes away very suddenly. There’s just a lot of things that make writing in November even more challenging. I find that it’s been really fun and helpful to provide as much support as we possibly can for free that whole month.
Jennifer: I love it. This is one of the things that we’re creating to be a free resource for people. If you’re watching this and you are an academic writer, you’re friends with or supervise an academic writer, please share it with them. We’re going to be sharing tips, advice, and really the struggles that people sometimes go through when it comes to sharing their writing. So this video is for you. It really is.
Katy: Yes. I’m so excited to be asking you some questions because you’re such a leader and expert in this space.
I would love to just for the academics among us, how do you define an online presence? Because I know that’s one of those things that can feel bigger than it is, but also smaller than it is. What do you include under that umbrella?
Jennifer: I’m so glad you asked this question because I feel like people have a really limited view of what it is to the things that we create about ourselves. “If I don’t have a website, if I don’t have a social media, then I don’t have an online presence.” But that’s not true.
Your online presence is anything that people can find about you online, whether it’s intentionally created by you or not. So that’s Google Search results. Maybe if people ChatGPT get to learn a little bit more about you, what comes up? There’s a lot of ways that we can find what our online presence is, but there’s also a lot of ways that we can be intentional in creating and shaping how people find our story online.
Katy: That’s such a generous way to look at it because I know so many people who are like, I don’t want to be on LinkedIn or I don’t want to be on this platform. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be there. All of that makes sense to me. But it also can be what you want it to be. The kind of point is to be intentional about it.
Jennifer: When we think it’s only social media, or only websites, or sometimes even only faculty profile, the thing that we’re often missing is your academic bio. Your bio is ending up on conference websites for journals, for events, programming, maybe fellowships or associations that you’re involved with. There’s so many places where your bio can show up online that it really ends up becoming a massive part of your online presence. People don’t expect that.
Katy: As somebody who has to regularly produce bios about myself and almost always feels some tension about it. Yes. That it’s such a good point that it’s more information about us circulates beyond where we put it on purpose. Right, exactly. Okay.
Cultivating authentic connections online for graduate students and faculty
Katy: What are the benefits that you see of for academics or people in the scholarly space that really do take that step to be intentional and thoughtful about the way that they show up online? What are the benefits that people can see from that?
Jennifer: I think the benefits that people maybe assume that they’re going to see is a lot of reach or maybe a ton of reads on their writing. And that kind of myth is, I mean, it’s not inaccurate. If you share more, people will find you more.
But the truth is that the benefits are really about the more individual connections, the reader who reads your writing and not only understands it and relates to it, but is citing it and helping share it with a larger goal in mind of being part of the research community. When I think about the connections that people are sometimes hoping for online, it doesn’t always equate to the meaningful deep relationships that they really enjoy that have come out of it. So whether that’s research, collaborations, new friends in your field, learning about a new conference or association that maybe you hadn’t heard of before, there’s so many opportunities for connection that we miss because maybe we just don’t think there’s agency in doing that, especially if networking feels uncomfortable to you.
Katy: Yeah, absolutely. I love the sort of way that you’re framing that because I think that for so many of us who reads us or even our H-index or these kind of really concrete data things are the easiest to measure. So we measure them first. But often they not separate from, but not necessarily as meaningful as we might want them to be in terms of the results we’re actually looking for.
Jennifer: To give you an example, so to be honest, I don’t share my academic writing much. I haven’t done academic writing since grad school. When I think about my own academic writing and my experience of sharing it, it’s been very surprising. I shared I’m in medievalist literature, and so when I shared an article that I had published, I was very surprised by the people who were responding to me: people who were not in my field, people who were not academics, people who cared about the literature, but I didn’t know that they did because they weren’t in the kind of environment that I was used to having these discussions in. Even my own experience, even though it’s relatively old now, I think that it was so meaningful for me to see the kind of invitation that my post ended up being that I didn’t expect.
I wasn’t like, “Oh my gosh, eight people are going to go read this article now that I’ve posted it on my personal Facebook.” But that’s what happened. Not only did that happen, but someone was like, “Oh, after I read this article, I brought it back to the grad school class where we’re talking about this book.” So then everyone ended up reading it, and I really thought that I was just posting to brag to be like, “Hey, I got this article out.” Like, you did it. This is great. As a grad student, I was very proud of myself and I wanted to share that feeling with people. While sharing your article can be the intention of your post, it’s also okay if you know what you’re sharing is more like me, like a feeling or the kind of warmth that we feel about our article and about our writing. It’s okay to be open about that even if you think that the people aren’t going to read it.
Katy: I love that so much, and I think that it’s such a brave and kind of generous thing to share because so much of the academic discourse is like I have officially done this important thing and I talk about it with important people and in important stoic ways. And sometimes you really are just like, listen folks, I passed my exams. There’s something so important about sharing authentically. I think that that’s something that academics can miss because in a lot of spaces we have that authenticity gently guided out of us or sometimes with a lot more force than that.
Jennifer: That’s true. Sometimes when my faculty clients we’re working together on social media. It’s pretty rare, but sometimes we’re actually focused on sharing their book or a specific publication or report that they’ve written. When that happens, they think that I’m going to tell them what to do. They think that I’m going to give them: here’s the specific template, we’re going to do all the things. Instead oftentimes we’re just having a conversation. I’m taking notes while we’re talking.
The things that you think already? The things that you want to share about your book already? Are good enough. They don’t need someone else to come in and tell you how to do it. Or what to do or what to say. It’s just that sometimes there’s things that we can add, or tweak, or enhance, because the thing that comes right out of our mouth, sometimes it needs a little bit of revision to help more people understand it.
Overcoming imposter syndrome and the lasting impact of sharing your story
Katy: That leads so beautifully into this question that I have because I tend to work with a lot of early career scholars, so grad students, post-docs, people who are just getting their feet wet. There is this real anxiety about who am I to be sharing about this thing? To your mind, what counts as expertise? What makes this important enough to share? Or do you measure it with something else altogether?
Jennifer: That’s a good question. I don’t think that I measure it, which is maybe the most interesting part of that. I’ll give an example. I had Meg Mindlin, who is an amazing graduate student, here on The Social Academic podcast. She has a very large platform on social media. She shares video. She shares octopus art. She is so cool. And, she has that same kind of feeling like, is this good enough to share? It doesn’t matter how large your platform is. You can still have that imposter syndrome. And frankly, it doesn’t matter where in your career you are. Meg is feeling that as a recent master’s student graduate.
And my clients who are mid-career and senior faculty? Many of them also still feel that way. I would encourage you to recognize that feeling. But maybe still practice it anyway because it might not go away. But you know what always makes it go away?
When my clients and I are doing this live on a call, we have a post, we’re ready to post it, we put it up and they get engagement sometimes while we’re still live. They’re like, “Oh, that’s a relief.” That’s a relief because I was scared about posting it. I did it. I was on the call with you, but now it’s out there and people are seeing it. The act of actually doing it, even if it’s just once or twice for this, even if you feel uncomfortable, it’s good practice. And I would say it’s okay to sit with that discomfort a little bit if you’re talking about something sensitive.
If you’re attracting negative reactions, I think that’s a different consideration. But for the vast majority of the things that you post, there are ways to talk about it that are not necessarily going to invite that kind of negative reaction. I just want people to feel a little bit more open to exploring it.
If you draft a post, hit publish, if it’s about your publication. Hit publish even if you’re not sure. So many of the people that I chat with are like, “Oh yeah, I drafted it, but it didn’t end up published.” Yeah, my hope for you is that it ends up published.
Katy: Oh, what a generous hope. It really reminds me of some of my favorite pieces of writing advice, which almost all boiled down to doing the thing is doing the thing. Writing isn’t necessarily thinking about writing, learning about writing, strategizing about your writing, drafting your writing, writing is writing. I think what you’re saying is sharing and building your presence is about sharing and building your presence. That there’s so much benefit in practice and doing it and learning that way as opposed to trying to perfect it up here first.
Jennifer: The results are long-term. Especially if we’re thinking about, I guess to be specific like a social media platform like LinkedIn, your post goes out today, maybe tomorrow, but that post has potential to reach people next week, next month, next year.
I literally went into my LinkedIn analytics yesterday and was like, wow, some of these posts are from over a year ago and they’re still reaching people this week. It’s surprising, but I think that potential was missed on old Twitter. You could reach a lot of people fast, but when the relevant people missed it the first time, they’re not going to see it later. That potential is possible on a profile like LinkedIn. It means that maybe it’s okay, you put a little bit of energy into your LinkedIn profile, even if you’re not job searching, you’re not doing any of the things like I get it, but LinkedIn can still help you reach all those people when you have something you want to say. It doesn’t have to be all the time.
Katy: As somebody who’s trying to uplevel on LinkedIn at this exact moment, I’m really resonating with what you say because it is this kind of vulnerable. They make it so easy to measure things like likes and metrics and shares, and you’re chasing that dopamine hit. You forget that the post lives beyond that initial kind of chemical brain reaction. It’s helpful to know good or bad that there’s a long tail.
Safety and community building online for academics and researchers
Katy: So I now have as from where you’re sitting, say I’m a graduate student, I’m an early faculty member, I’m even a late faculty member. Goodness knows, we’re all busy. I only have a certain amount of time.
What’s your best pitch for investing some of my precious energy into building this presence when it might not necessarily be something that’s directly measured by my advisor, my chair, my tenure committee, my colleagues? Why do it?
Jennifer: That’s a good question. I think that the advice that I had even a year ago probably would have been different, but I’ve had a lot of graduate students reach out this year because they want a stronger online presence. They don’t have the time, especially mid-career people with family or folks that are in a transition of fields. If you don’t have the time, but you still want an online presence, there’s ways to have that happen. You don’t have to work with me, but just know that there’s people that can help you and that you don’t have to do it yourself. Or, you can do it with a friend. There’s different ways to take back or make better use of some of that time if doing it yourself is not ideal. When you are planning to stay in academia, when you’re planning to have the research thinking projects that you’re working on now, be something that people can engage with long-term.
It’s always a good investment of your time to create your online presence. I would never suggest someone not create an online presence unless personal safety was really at not just the forefront of their minds but could affect their mental health. I’m saying that as someone who has been there before, I’m a survivor of domestic violence. When I left my physically abusive ex-husband, I deleted all my socials. I didn’t have anything. I didn’t want to be found online by anyone. So I’ve been there. But I also know the power of taking that space back and being really intentional about what people find there. Do I literally still worry that my ex-husband is going to email my clients and harass them? Yes, I’m not going to lie. Honestly, that is possible. And so when I think about how I show up online, I am very intentional about who is going to see this, how they can engage with it, and what the potential ramifications are if something goes wrong.
I think about that also right now in terms of protecting my clients when things in America are politically quite volatile for freedom of speech. There’s a lot of things that we can take into consideration in terms of time and energy that are beyond just us, that are a part of the larger world. But when it’s your own time, it doesn’t all have to happen at once. Any small change that you can make for your online presence.
Whether you’re in grad school or early career researcher, or much later on in your academic career, that time and energy makes a difference. Maybe you’re only updating a sentence or two in your bio. Maybe you’re spending a day focusing on creating that LinkedIn profile that you really did not feel like you needed in the past.
There are things that you can do and you have agency in doing, but it doesn’t all have to happen at once. And, it doesn’t have to happen at all if it’s not a goal for you. But for most writers that I talk to, it is a goal at least sharing their writing, sharing their research is a goal. I encourage you to have that online presence, even if it’s not the personal online presence that maybe you see friends or colleagues having too.
Katy: That is such generous advice. I’m so happy to hear you talk about the sort of risk of this because I know that I personally am working with a lot of clients who are afraid not just for their own sort of reputation online, but for the funding of their labs, for the ability to get doxed if they’re studying a thing that somebody finds. I think what you said earlier in kind of our conversation that you have an online presence, whether you work on it or not, that being able to shape things like how I appear on my department website, how I appear in my bios in places that people can access and could potentially freedom of information actor get access to.
All of that information exists online for most of us through these old conference programs, through all of these other things that more and more are being ingested or searchable in maybe ways that weren’t even two years ago. It’s going to happen whether you are intentionally engaging with it or not. This is maybe a moment for people to say, okay, how can I think about these presences and show up in them in a way that accurately represents my research. But also takes into account that “I need to stay safe, my colleagues need to stay safe, my students need to stay safe, and if they’re going to write it, I might as well write it.”
Jennifer: There’s power when we show up online. There is also an invitation for folks who maybe look like us, or think like us, or worry about the same things as us, or care about the same things. There is potential for those people to see the space that you’ve taken online and feel that they can claim some of that too, that they can also create more storytelling, more openness, more connection through what they’re able to share online.
Katy: I think about that with sort of my own presence all of the time because I am pretty open about my mental health struggles on my blog. I am incredibly privileged to do that in a lot of ways because I’m my own boss, so nobody’s going to fire me if I say something. If I can be the one to take on some of that risk and say, “Hey, I had a really crappy mental health day, and here are six ways that I reset,” and knowing that I’m putting that information out for people to encounter it when they need it to? If I can take that risk, then that lets other people take some of that burden off. That’s one of the ways that communities can function really generously is to say, okay, I have this space to take some of this on. Why don’t I host the meeting point for this idea so that you can benefit from it and maybe not have to take that on yourself.
Jennifer: Yeah, I really like that. And for graduate students who are teaching, early career researchers who teaching, is not just a focus for you, but something that you care about your online presence can really help your students. I have a whole article on The Social Academic blog. I feel like there’s so many people who maybe they’re not going to make an online presence for themselves. They’re not going to make an online presence for their writing, even if they want more people to read it. But they will make an online presence if they understand ways in which it helps more people, especially the people they’re teaching or helping mentor. I encourage you, even if you’re not thinking about this for yourself, it’s okay to think about it for other people too. Because sometimes you’re doing it for other people, and it ends up helping all of you. I think that’s really beautiful.
Katy: Yes, please do link that for me and for everybody. I think that’s one of the important ways to sort of think about this is that this nourishes all the way down. Just to give a practical example, I work with a lot of people who are looking for labs to join, looking for advisors, or they’re looking for even job searches and they’re trying to figure out fit. There’s so much information intentionally there and not sometimes that lets people know this is a good fit for me. I would be safe to research here. If you think about it like that, these are secret love letters to help you find the grad students who would be really aligned for you, the collaborations that would be really helpful. Then that can give an incentive where you should make a LinkedIn so that you can have a LinkedIn might not have that same hit.
Jennifer van Alstyne’s tips for your personal academic website or research lab website
Jennifer: Could I give an example of that?
Katy: Yes, please do.
Jennifer: I was working with a PI. We were working on the content for her website pages for the teaching section, and she was kind of wondering, “Should I make this more for the students? Should it be more for people who are evaluating me? I’m not sure who the audience of this page was.” I was like, first of all, let’s make it for the students because I think that’s what’s going to be most helpful. But second, if we can provide a little bit more information for them about your lab, about what it’s like to work with you, it will help them in their future careers.
She had this light bulb moment, which was, “Oh, last time I was looking through applications for people who wanted to join my lab. I noticed that one of the candidates had a specific lab that I had no idea what it was listed in their resume.” And she was like, “I couldn’t find information about it online other than a quick mention on a university website. So I had no idea how the research from this lab related to mine, and I almost passed the graduate student up.” When they met, they actually talked about the lab and had opportunity to see the connection more clearly, but that hesitation that almost stopped her from reaching out to the student to schedule that interview. When I think about the potential that is missed because PIs haven’t taken the chance to have a little bit of a stronger online presence, it can harm your students. I don’t want that to happen. If you have the capacity, if you have the space to think about how you’re showing up online. Or, if you’re a student in that lab that doesn’t have an online presence, can you add a description of it to your LinkedIn profile so people can learn more about it? You have agency, whether that’s inviting or letting your PI know that you would love for them to have a stronger online presence, or trying to find ways to create space for that yourself. You have options.
Katy: Yeah. That makes me sort of lead into this next question, which is writing for an online audience is such a specific skill. Are there ways that you can suggest that people can? Because I know that personally, if somebody said, “Hey, make a website to describe your lab,” I might be like, “I don’t know how to do that,” and sort of push it off because it’s so much harder. What are your top tips for helping people build that skill of writing for this specific context?
Jennifer: Before we can write for the specific contents, we kind of have to know what we want to write. The best resources that I have for folks who are like, “I want to create a website and I’m not sure what goes on it” is: I have one for personal academic websites and one for research lab websites. So there’s an answer for both of you, but it is a long list, a descriptive list of page ideas for your website. There’s so much content that you could add. And, there’s only a handful of that content that probably is most relevant to you. Before you start writing, think about what’s most important for me to share? I will link those articles below as well because they are great resources for anyone who is creating a website, updating a website. If you’re an academic who has that kind of permanent space online, check out these resources because that’s definitely the first place that I would recommend going.
A lot of people get stuck in the writing process. It’s a reason the services that I create really take most of that away, off of the plate of the faculty who I’m working with. So, I end up doing a lot of writing for folks. Sometimes that’s bio writing, which is its own project. Oftentimes, it’s condensing the things that we talk about in interviews and the materials that they’ve sent to me into written website content. But I want you to know that if you are like, “I can design my own website and I don’t really want to do my own writing,” there are still people who can help you with that. So reach out to me and I’ll help connect you with someone who may be able to support you in that process if you’re not wanting to do it yourself.
You can be a very strong academic writer. You can be a very good public speaker. You can be very good at all of these things and still feel like your web writing isn’t where you want it to be. This is not an insult to you. This is not a lack of knowledge or skills or capacity. Oftentimes, it’s much harder to write about ourselves than it is to write about other things. Especially things where, yes, you’re in research, you’re getting all of these inputs, data, places that you can cite and source and organize and reorganize. You are used to spending a lot of time on that. And when you think about spending that same amount of time on writing about yourself? It probably doesn’t feel the same way as you feel about your research. That’s okay. One: it’s okay to seek help.
Two: it’s okay to do it in steps. You could do a one page website first and grow it over time. Three: it’s okay to just publish it. If you’re not sure about your web writing and you maybe want to improve it, but you still want your website up, please, please publish it. Writing can always change over time and your website will 100% change over time. There is almost no one that I’ve ever met that is like, “I made this website once and haven’t touched it since then.” Oftentimes, it’s not going to happen every year, but every once in a while you’re going to notice, “This doesn’t quite feel like me anymore.” Those are things that you can address and change because it’s your space, because it’s your website.
Katy: There’s so much good advice and strategy in there. One of the things that I’m really hearing that is one of the common phrases out of my mouth too is that as academics, we are sort of taught that “writing is forever.” Once it gets published, it’s a thing and it exists and it’s citable. The reality is both about anything that’s kind of online and also in a lot of ways your academic writing, there’s snapshots of your thinking and time. If time changes and your thinking changes, then you get a new snapshot.
Did your university offer you a website? Yay. Keep this in mind
Katy: So many of us carry this kind of really resistance to being like, “I’m not sure that this accurately captures everything.” I can’t tell you: I changed my website five, six times a month because I’m always catching typos or things that didn’t flow or things I want to change or things I want to tweak.
Those things are so much more visible to me than they are to anybody else. I have built a thriving web presence with zero capital letters and many typos everywhere all of the time. That’s just sort of the brain that I have and the way that I show up. I move a little bit faster and break more stuff and have to kind of redo it. There’s something to be said for learning to do a skill and building it in public. A lot of us as academics are really used to learning in private building, in private researching in private and then presenting publicly and having it be really big stakes. I’m so much better of an academic writer because I started publicly writing those skills feed each other in a way that I didn’t expect.
Jennifer: Now, one thing that I want to mention about that is a free tool, especially for graduate students, early career researchers. Owlstown is a free academic website builder. If you are wanting a website and you’re like, “I don’t have website skills, I don’t really want to develop them,” Owlstown can set up your website in like 15-30 minutes. You can have a website today for free that’s easy to update and keep with you and kind of personalize a little bit even over time. I just want you to know that that is an option for you. If you’re wanting a website, you’re not wanting to do it yourself or work with an academic website designer like me, that’s okay. There’s options for you to still have that space online.
Katy: Also to have another sort of low cost plug, I know that my first academic website was hosted through my library at my university. Oftentimes there is somebody in the kind of beautiful war in of resources in libraries that if they don’t know where to do it for free on campus, they can absolutely help you with almost all of those parts.
Jennifer: This is definitely true, but I am hesitant to recommend it to folks. That’s because I have met so many people whose websites just disappeared when their universities decided to stop offering that service.
Katy: Oh, wow, okay.
Jennifer: Sometimes there’s notice, but sometimes there’s not. And so, I just want to be a friend. If you are creating a space on a site that is internal, that’s hosted by your university, yay, I’m so excited for you. Save a copy of all of your text. Save a copy of all your photos just in case. Just in case something goes wrong, I want you to have that so it’s movable to another space if you ever need it.
Katy: Yes. Speaking from people who lose access to their emails all the time, there is real wisdom in being use the university if they’ve got it. But keep a copy for you.
Jennifer: Oh, I feel like when I was in grad student, so much of the advice that was given to me was always use your university email address. This is how people are going to know that you’re legit. But the truth is, I lost access to all of those emails. I have no idea of any of the conversations that were shared, and I did not save them in time in order to keep them. When I think about that loss, that loss of what feels like archive to me, it makes me sad. So when I think about the writing that you do, yes, academic writing is important, public writing is important, anything that you create is important, but so are the emails and conversations that you have if they’re meaningful for you to keep. Yeah, this is kind of all areas of your life. If it’s meaningful for you, try and find a way of saving it.
Katy: Wow. That’s such good writing and information. This is what I find with so many of my conversations with really brilliant people in the academic spaces that we all find the places where everything all connects. One of them is that it just is really important to keep hold of what’s yours, whether that is your data, your information, and if there are ways to keep it personally, then it almost always behooves you to do it because as much as we would like to trust that the Higher Ed institutions are eternal and that our web space and storage will always be there. Goodness knows that things really can shift.
Jennifer: They really can shift. I was actually just hosting for ContentEd Live. It was a 48-hour Higher Education conference. What I found was that there’s so many people who are making very large decisions about things like website, things like technology infrastructure. They’re coming from a top down approach of making decisions that help and improve things for the entire community. Oftentimes they’re making decisions that affect faculty without recognizing some of the loss that can happen when this kind of decision happens. One example (this is not from the conference), but last year I had a client who came to me because his faculty profile. All of a sudden they’d removed all the email addresses from faculty profiles. So the place that was the home for his online presence no longer helped connect media, journalists, or research collaborators with how to actually get in touch with him.
All of a sudden there was this new need for an online presence that allowed for those things. Sometimes when those decisions come down from the top, they really do help everyone. This university got 30+ million SPAM and phishing emails each month. I understand why decisions are sometimes made. But when we don’t have control over them, it means that we need to be aware of what our options are for taking up space outside of those structures. We’re all working towards helping students, helping research, helping facilitate the meaning of Higher Education in the world and how it impacts the real lives of the people who are in it. But if we’re losing access to the things that matter most to us, then sometimes we have to recreate those spaces ourselves.
Katy: Absolutely. There’s something so important as we think about this whole umbrella of an online presence is thinking through what are the most important things for you in this presence? If one of them is “I want outside collaborators to find me, I want to be available for media, I want to be public facing,” then probably where you’re going to spend your time and energy is completely different than “I’m a PI. I want a steady stream of people in my lab who are values aligned and project aligned. They might spend their two or three hours a month completely differently than somebody who has these other kind of options.
Aligning your online presence with your personal and professional goals
Katy: One of the things that I’m sure that you see as well as I do is that people kind of get the advice. You have to have a website, you have to have this, you have to have that. And they don’t really think through, okay, what do I want this project? Because it is a project to do for me. And the more clarity you can have about that, the easier it is to make that project fit the need as opposed to trying to collage seven or eight things because somebody told you they were important.
Jennifer: 100%. Oftentimes I found that actually it may be seven or eight things that are important to you, but there’s a hierarchy for what those things are in terms of your energy, your capacity, what actually fits into your life. Sometimes we’re designing a website that is going to be attractive for media, for podcast invitations, even if that’s not something you’re actively reaching out to. But, the vast majority of our energy is going into explaining the lab and inviting people to explore the projects that you’re doing. I want to encourage people to create intentional time for yourself to think about the people you want to come to your website or to come to visit your online presence. Maybe it’s a LinkedIn profile. Who do you want to come there? How do you hope that they can engage with you? I had one person be like, I just want a repository.
I don’t actually want to engage with people, but I want them to find my writing.” That’s okay too. We just published her website. It is out there and it’s going to be with her for, frankly, a lifetime. Websites can be there with you for your lifetime. They can grow and adapt with you as your goals and needs change. Maybe media, podcasting, is not a goal for you now. But when you’re running a lab in three years, actually it would be great to have your research on a research podcast in your field. How cool would that be to reach only people who are really into the thing that you’re talking about?
Katy: Exciting. That’s pretty cool too. Yeah, I think it just is. So with so many things, the intentionality is key. And a little bit of effort in the front to be like, what am I doing with this? And, why do I want it? Can just pay dividends.
Jennifer: If you don’t want to work through that on your own, reach out. I’m happy to help you with that process. Or, to design your website for you. Whatever feels supportive.
Your impact, your writing, your academic life matters
Katy: Awesome. Are there any other things? I guess my last final question is if you were to kind of sum up the very best thing about working with academics specifically on their online presences (as opposed to micro influencers or content house kids or, I taught digital media, so I’m always like, Ooh, the handlers of famous internet cats). What’s sort of so special about this group that keeps you coming back to this incredibly specific but pretty diverse niche?
Jennifer: I’m really glad you asked about this. This is a question I’ve been thinking of a lot this year. This is the first year in my business where people from outside Higher Education are really like, what are you doing in there? What are you doing? It seems like your industry is imploding. You should consider coming and working over here, go work over there. I’ve had referrals for very large projects that are outside of academia and I don’t want any of them. The people who refer them, they love that about me to be honest, but they keep trying. And when I think about that, it’s really because the researchers, academics, graduate students that I work with, they are each creating meaning in the world. They’re each creating really interesting thinking, writing, teaching. The things that they do are also really varied. So my brain that really likes to be creative in different ways gets to work with people in a lot of different fields.
I get to learn so much from the people that I work with. I get to hear their stories and experiences and I relate to them. Even though I’m not in academia, I only work with academics. I mostly work with individuals. I’m not part of the academic world entirely, but I am supportive of this world entirely. Actually, at the conference yesterday, someone said, “We’re all across universities all around the world. We’re all working towards this hope.” And I thought, oh my goodness. I’m not a Chief Marketing Officer at a university, but I am someone who’s working on the same problem, who’s working towards this same future where research, and education, and teaching, and mentoring, and the service work, and all the things that faculty do for their society, it’s meaningful. And it makes a difference. And it doesn’t have to stay hidden.
I help people make connections that make more meaning and matter in the world for the things that they care about. And yes, I could go do that for a big company. I could go do that for, I don’t know, celebrities if I wanted to. I remember the first time that I actually, I pitched a musician on bio writing and he said yes. And I was like, “Oh wait. I dunno.” I didn’t end up doing that project, but I remember feeling like I can do a lot more. And also I don’t want to explore that, because I love who I work with. I’ve had to build some things into that flexibility to reschedule things. And that does change how I work with people. But it also means that I get to work with exactly who I care about supporting and I love it.
Katy: I got choked up when you talked about the hope because I think that I know. I was on parental leave for about 18 months and I kind of came back to a completely different online landscape. But also a pretty different higher education landscape too. I work with people and I think that appeals to a lot of people who are like, listen, I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t believe so strongly that someone needed it somewhere.
There’s something so important to me about being a tiny bit of the support that holds up the people who are doing that work. There’s so much. I think about it a lot. I am not the rock that goes in the pond that has the ripples that we can’t even track, but if I can help hold that hand up just long enough so that they can drop it, they did all of the work. But if I could be on the side of the pond cheering and be like, it’s okay to drop it, I love it. I think that that really goes because there’s such a misperception about what academics are or what we’re doing or what we spend our time on. The majority of people are deeply invested in their research because they believe it has the power to change something for someone oftentimes for the better. The more that we can do this important work of being like, this is what happens in this lab, this is why it’s important that we put shrimp on treadmills, and this is why it’s important that I go through these archives and I look at all of these things. The more visibility, I think the more options that we have to change that narrative that we’re all just spending money and brainwashing kids because that’s not it.
Build confidence by being intentional about how you show up online
Jennifer: I think that the hope that I am feeling that I’m working towards, I really felt it yesterday because, so I was hosting (moderating) four keynotes, seven breakout sessions, two Welcome to the Americas. It was two days back-to-back of being host and moderator and I loved it. But I realized at the very last session, the speaker who was so amazing, he was like, “I had recognized you from tv.” And I’m like, “Oh! TV. Am I on TV?” Have I been on TV? I was like, “Wait, ooooh, you mean the conference lobby screen.” And all of the sessions I introduced and led Q&A for. I literally forgot that I was on camera. Many people met me and got to know me over the last two days, even though I didn’t really get to know them as well because they were webinar attendees.
But I’m so proud of my online presence. I’m so proud of what I know they’ll find if they want to connect with me further. That feeling of relief for networking, for sharing something, for putting myself out there in some way is huge. As an introverted person, I dunno, that surprises some people, but I’m very introverted. I spend most of my time at home working from my office here in San Diego. I connect with people online. But part of that connection, I would not feel as comfortable with it if I didn’t feel confident in what people found about me. So if you’re feeling like networking, or sharing your writing, or just being more open about who you are is uncomfortable? Sometimes doing this work upfront is the key to making it feel [sigh of relief].
Katy: Yeah, I absolutely do know. I send out a newsletter every Thursday and I had published a pretty vulnerable one this week about how I had gotten this advice to write every day as a early PhD student, and I pretty much destroyed myself trying to follow it and all of the work that it’s taken me to be like, you know what? I’m an okay writer even though I’ve never had an unbroken writing streak and I’m an okay writer even though I’ve never done 30 days of writing. I woke up, my emails are scheduled to send out at 5:56 AM Eastern time, and I woke up out of a dead sleep at 5:45 and was like, “I should cancel that email. That feels vulnerable, that feels tender. I’m not going to do it.” And I was like: Go back to sleep. The baby is asleep. You should be sleeping.
Then sort of went about my morning and kind of forgot that I had put this thing out there and to thousands of people. When I came back from drop off and breakfast, there were three emails in there that were like, “Thank you for saying this.” This is something I didn’t know. I just remembered how I am never going to be the person who will say that to a stranger on a bus. I probably wouldn’t even have said it live to my students, but if I can take the time to craft it, if I can revise it, if I can think about it, if I can be intentional about it and send it out in this way, I can also connect, I can share, and it doesn’t have to be gate kept. I can do it. This is my email list. People can unsubscribe if they choose not to be interested in this kind of vulnerable share. I wish them well in that particular way. But there’s a power that I didn’t always feel as an academic trying to publish or go to conferences or be in those places that when I control the flow, I can show up in ways that are so much more intentional.
Increase your impact with strategic approaches to your online presence
Jennifer: One of the things you said really brought up something I want to be sure to add to this call, which is that there are so many people who feel like a social media post should be a 10 minute project or less. The truth is that if we’re talking about even your university, even your college, your department, if they have someone who’s in charge of this, they are probably putting a lot more effort, a lot more time into social media posts than you think. This is true for the vast majority of creators on the internet. If you’re seeing something, it’s possible 30 hours went into that one minute short video, like a short vertical video. So I just really want people to consider, yes, your time is precious. Yes, your time is limited. But your words are meaningful. It’s okay to give yourself more time for that social media posts, or revision time for that social media posts, if it’s something that you feel like will help you. You can take more time. You can take as much time as you want. But just don’t let it be so much time that you’re never hitting publish at all.
Katy: Yes. Well, and not to sing the praises of LinkedIn because it’s not really my particular jam, but there is something really beautiful about some of these other, X was so fast and things were so ephemeral. And now there have been sort of algorithm shifts in a lot of different places. But for better or for worse, LinkedIn is one of the places where you don’t necessarily get punished for publishing once every six months, once a year. Definitely not. They do kind of maintain this beautiful archive for you. If you are a person who likes to think about things and likes to be really deliberate and really intentional it, you don’t need to necessarily opt out of all of these things. You can find a project, a place in the sort of online umbrella that meets the tempo that makes you feel safe enough to do it
Jennifer: And meeting the tempo, it makes you feel safe. That’s a really good point. There are people who push themselves to be on social media platforms they think they should be on, but it really doesn’t work for their personalities. And it really doesn’t work for their lifestyle. And sometimes it makes them angry, and frustrated, and even guilty at not having done more of this. When people come to me and they’re feeling like that, I say, “Get rid of it. It’s okay. Stop.” It’s okay to stop. It’s okay to not do it. If you are going to have a platform that I still recommend you have a profile on but you’re not posting it, that’s not what you want to do. LinkedIn is that place. I have a free LinkedIn Profile course that’s great for grad students, researchers, faculty. I have lots of links to drop in the chat after this, but I want you to know that this LinkedIn Profile course exists. It will walk you through step-by-step making that profile because that profile is one of my favorite ways to have an online presence. If you are a graduate student, if you are an early career researcher, this will really help you get connected with people who can inform your career, who can help guide the decision making that you have, especially if you’re open to chatting with them.
Katy: Yeah. Well thank you. This has filled me up top to bottom, just this…
Jennifer: …Has been so good! This is the first time I’ve done this kind of Q&A. love it.
Katy: Okay, good. We’ll keep going. You’re a star at it. Just appreciate star in the making. Thank you so much for having me on and for being willing to spread a little bit of the word about AcWriMo out. If you’re looking for someplace where you want intention around your writing and not necessarily belt yourself to the chair and get it done, Dr. Kate Henry and I we’re your people
Jennifer: Thank you so much. Everyone. Be sure to like subscribe. Hit the notification bell if you want to let get an email next time we go live. Thank you everyone.
Dr. Katy Peplin is the founder of Thrive PhD, a business born out of her own journey through the PhD, and the joys and challenges of being a grad student and a human at the same time. She earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation centered on animals on film and media. Throughout her degree, she also worked as a teaching consultant at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, practiced yoga regularly, and lived with chronic illness and anxiety. These days, she’s super into knitting, colorful water bottles, and helping graduate students around the world treat graduate school like part of their career and life, and not just the holding period before the real stuff begins.
