ADVT 480: Advertising Issues

How do you help an expert teacher move online without losing what makes her classroom work? Oh, and she's also your mother.

When COVID-19 extended remote teaching into 2021, I volunteered to help Mariea Hoy, my mother and university professor, transform Advertising Issues from an emergency online course into one intentionally designed for virtual learning. Across four months of evenings and weekends, we rebuilt it together: clarifying outcomes, mapping activities and assessments, converting lectures into asynchronous preparation, and redesigning live sessions around discussion, application, and feedback. She had spent more than 35 years becoming an exceptional teacher; my job was not to teach her how to teach. It was to help translate what made her classroom work into a new environment, and leave her confident enough to keep evolving it herself.

AT A GLANCE

Context: Volunteer Instructional DesignerUniversity of Tennessee2020
Audience: Undergraduate and graduate advertising students
Scale: Approximately 290 students across 10 course offerings
Collaborators: Mariea HoyProfessor of Advertising (and my mother)

Need

Move a discussion-rich advertising course beyond emergency remote delivery while supporting a veteran professor who had limited confidence with educational technology.

Solution

Co-design a flipped, four-module experience that moves content preparation asynchronously, reserves live sessions for discussion and application, and gradually equips the instructor to sustain the course independently.

Deliverable

A reusable Canvas course with aligned objectives and assessments, recorded lectures, interactive activities, adaptable templates, and step-by-step faculty guides.

Impact

Students rated the course highly, and its structure, activities, and media remained in use across approximately 290 enrollments and ten offerings through Spring 2024.

Takeaway

Faculty development is most durable when the instructor is a co-designer rather than a customer. Building the course with my mother — showing, coaching, documenting, and then letting her drive — created both a sustainable course and a lovely professional collaboration.

Methods & Tools: Course mapping · Backward design · Faculty coaching · Flipped learning · Canvas · Zoom · Video production · Collaborative learning