Staff Spotlight: Jill Giacomini
Get to know our TIPS team!
Teaching Innovation and Program Strategy | TIPS Dec 1, 2024
The Staff Spotlight is a chance for our campus community to get to know more about our TIPS team members and what they do. Today we are featuring Senior Instructional Designer Jill Giacomini.
How do you bring your previous professional experiences to bear on the work you do here with TIPS? I have over 20 years of experience working in higher education, with more than half of that time spent developing and improving my skills as an instructional designer. Prior to becoming an ID, I spent several years working on federally funded, early childhood grants where I managed a wide range of communication and creative tasks including national partner organization relationships, content creation, web design and development, social media management and product design and development. Over the years I have worked with a multitude of faculty from different universities and across discipline areas to design and develop online and hybrid courses. These experiences have helped me to cultivate a structured, supportive and flexible approach to my work in TIPS, based on the belief that empathetic and respectful relationships create the best pathways to transformative and meaningful work.
What’s a project you’ve worked on recently that you are proud of or excited about? I collaborated with my colleague Amy Linville to create a resource called Getting Started in Canvas: Building Blocks for an Organized and Effective Course. This project met a need I was seeing repeatedly in my work, specifically with faculty who might be new to teaching at CU Denver and were having trouble finding and keeping track of the information and resources they needed as they developed and began teaching their courses in Canvas. This resource organizes critical information, tips, videos and how-to guides all in one place, providing faculty with an easy way to find the information they need--especially at stressful and critical times during the term!
What do you find most meaningful about your current role? As a learning professional, I love having the opportunity to meet one-on-one with lots of interesting people and talk with them about something that they know so well and are typically quite passionate about. Many of the people I work with have dedicated their entire careers to the pursuit of becoming an expert in a given area and, instead of simply keeping that knowledge to themselves for their own benefit, they care enough to share their expertise with others to help them grow, pursue their own goals and make their own contributions. I feel lucky that my work enables me to be a part of a process that facilitates such profound sharing, connection and growth.
Finally, tell us a little about yourself outside of work! I am currently completing my Doctor of Education in Leadership for Educational Equity at CU Denver—my dissertation research is focused on applying a psychological safety framework to online course design in higher education. I also teach online courses in the Learning Design & Technology graduate program for the CU Denver School of Education and Human Development. In addition to having a daughter in college and a son in high school, my husband and I are both from large families which means you will often find me driving up and down the front range, into the mountains, or out on plains for kids’ sporting events, school activities and family time or traveling to Connecticut for vacation, celebrations, and events. Regular weekends are predictably Colorado with summer hikes and sneaking away to ski in the winter when time allows—preferably mid-week to avoid the crowds!