Consume the services you provide for faculty by actively teaching. You will never understand the challenges of academia until you teach. Then trying research.
I have always been a believer in consuming the technology you provide to faculty so that you understand the challenges they have in teaching, research, and service. After stabilizing technology services at the university system, I accepted an offer to teach by Ephraim McLean , the Department Chair of the Management of Information Systems in the Mack Robinson School of Business at Georgia State University. He had been actively recruiting me to teach cybersecurity. I had checked with my boss at the time, Susan Herbst, the Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Academic Officer of the University System of Georgia and she approved my request.
My position would initially be as an adjunct professor and I would later transition to become a part time but regular full professor after a global search and interviews by search committee. Because everything has political implications in Georgia, I checked with Chancellor Huckaby and received his approval to compete for the part time but regular full professor position.
I taught two courses every semester at Georgia State and very much enjoyed the engagement with students and faculty in an innovative top 10 business school. The students were hard working, the faculty were world class and dedicated to their students, and the department and college were well led. After Eph retired, I worked for Bala Ramesh, the new department chair who was an equally fantastic boss.
I ended up winning three teaching awards associated with the Master of Information Technology and Master of Information Systems programs in 2016 and 2017. These awards were voted on by the students in the programs and thus particularly meaningful to me.
At some point during my tenure, Georgia State University was asked to offer an additional course in the Georgia Online Virtual Instruction Enterprise Wide (GoView). These were courses that were jointly offered and accepted across all of the universities in the Georgia system. My Introduction to Computer Security course was chosen and thus I built and taught an additional class within the GoView environment. I applaud the approach for student success and working as a system. It is more challenging, of course, to teach to students from numerous universities on different schedules and different academic experiences. I was up for the challenge and my lovely wife Eileen kicked in almightily to help me with the grading. The course was well-received and very popular. Most importantly, more students graduated and learned about cybersecurity along the way.
As I transitioned to the new realities of teaching outside of West Point, one of the things I did right was to build video recordings of my classes in YouTube segments of less than ten minutes. The shorter segments supported more focused learning and the ability of students to quickly review a problematic area as opposed to a monolithic one or two hour video. I did it in YouTube because I thought it would be the most accessible form for my students. What I did not know is I would attract and continue to attract more than 1,000 YouTube subscribers from around the world who continue to consume my content from the classes even though I am not their professor.
Like all faculty, there was a service component to my work outside of teaching. I worked as part of a team to pursue a cybersecurity center of excellence at Georgia State University. Given my military background, when the Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Mike Rogers, visited Georgia State University in 2016, the university leadership asked me to brief him and lead an engagement for GSU designation as a NSA Center of Excellence. I assisted recruit local chief information officers to join the Mack Robinson advisory board given I had a personal relationship with many of them.
I retired from Georgia State University simply because I would make more retired than I would continuing to teach. We all reach this point in our professions. Besides, this CIO role was keeping me really busy.
If you are progressing through this website sequentially, the next chapter is The Data Trail of Tears and Triumph.