Human-Computer Interaction: Designing Technology for People.  The MITRE Institute, October 2004, November 2007, December 2007, March 2009.  (14 contact hours)

Introduction to Human-Robot Interaction. Tutorial given to Intelligent User Interface Conference 2006, January 2006.  Co-developed with Prof. Holly Yanco and Dr. Jean Scholtz and co-presented with Dr. Scholtz.  (7 contact hours)

Acquiring Usable Collaborative Systems.  The MITRE Institute, June 2003.  (7 contact hours)

HCI Survival Skills for Systems Engineers.  The MITRE Institute, October 2001, November 2001, January 2002, March 2002.  (14 contact hours)

TEACHING STATEMENT

Even from the earliest days of my career I have been responsible for teaching difficult technical concepts to a variety of people.  Working in MITRE's Federally Funded Research and Development Centers has required me to solve technical problems for government sponsors and then explain to them why and how they should implement my recommendations.  My customers are usually smart people who do not have all the relevant technical knowledge (hence their need for MITRE's help), so I have continually found myself in the position of educating them while respecting their own areas of expertise.

It's tremendously exciting to create a learning environment in the classroom as a way of mentoring the next generation of professionals.  I have taught two kinds of classes: 1- or 2-day courses for practitioners in a corporate or conference setting and graduate-level university courses.  Both of these types of courses are concerned primarily with HCI—either for single-user or multi-user systems—and cognitive systems engineering. 

In both types of courses I take a hands-on approach.  Ideally, I plan for an hour of exercise(s) for every 90 minutes of lecture, with the exercises allowing students—usually working in groups—to experience first-hand what I’ve talked about in the lectures.  HCI and cognitive systems engineering courses are well suited to this approach because computer-based interfaces are all around us and many of the techniques or theories about them can be illustrated or even attempted—at least in part—during the course of an hour exercise.  If an exercise isn’t reasonable, I encourage discussion via “what if?” types of questions during which I ask students what they would do in various situations.

In the practitioner courses, I tailor each class session to the expectations and needs of the individual attendees.  I start each class by using an exercise that has three purposes: get students to interact with each other, and to provide information to me regarding students’ prior relevant experience and expectations.  I alter my lectures to provide more advanced information if the students are ready for it or more basic information if they have not been previously exposed to the material I’m presenting.  I end the course by going over the information about expectations that I had captured earlier and summarize what I presented that pertains to their desires for the course.

Also for practitioners, I recently co-developed (with Charles Bowen and Kara Ryan) a computer-based training course that was taken by approximately 300 MITRE systems engineering professionals in its first year.  This three-hour version of a two-day practitioner course has already been taken by as many students as the instructor-led version achieved in the past nine years.

In the graduate level courses I also try to be sensitive to students’ prior level of preparation but I am much more cognizant of the need to ensure that students’ attain a mastery of the course objectives.  Each course involves a group project that mimics the type of teamwork I expect they will encounter in a workplace situation.

Besides the courses I have already taught, I am qualified to teach courses on managing a user-centered design team, interface localization/internationalization, collaborative or groupware systems, measurement of the user experience, intelligent user interfaces, human-robot interaction, usability engineering, field methods, and systems engineering.

Updated 6 November 2010.