As UGA instructors continue to move toward active-learning approaches to teaching, instructional design technology specialists like Katie Smith are playing a key role in helping make digital teaching tools accessible for faculty and students.

Smith, recently named the UGA College of Pharmacy’s 2015 Employee of the Year, works with a team to create active-learning materials for the college’s classes.

“We support faculty in facilitating learning,” Smith said of her team. “We help faculty when they see a gap or an opportunity to try something new. We help them think through that. It’s a collaborative process.”

Smith is a member of the pharmacy college’s instructional design and technology office, which works to support teaching and learning through instructional design services, integration and support of technical systems in learning spaces, faculty training, multimedia development, and research and development of instructional technologies.

With a background in media production and instructional technology, Smith’s role is to create digital course modules with instructional videos and computer simulation programs designed to help pharmacy students learn to make complex decisions when caring for patients.

For Smith, this process is creative, and the results are functional.

“I think of myself as a ‘maker.’ I like making things and putting things together,” she said. “It’s neat to see creative stuff have a purpose and go beyond an entertainment purpose.”

Smith has been interested in the intersection of media, creativity and education since she was a child. Her dream job once was to help produce Sesame Street.

She followed that dream by getting a bachelor’s degree in telecommunication arts from the Grady College at UGA. She then earned master’s degrees in instructional design from the College of Education and ecology from the Odum School.

But first, Smith pursued work in educational TV in New York, Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada, before returning to UGA to specialize in instructional technology.

After working at UGA’s Center for Teaching and Learning for several years, Smith joined the pharmacy college’s instructional design team in 2012.

Pharmacy college faculty prepare their students to make quick, but effective, decisions for patients, and the team in the instructional design and technology office helps support that goal.

As part of that process, Smith and Russ Palmer, a fellow College of Pharmacy instructional designer with a rich understanding of education theory, work with faculty to define instructional needs. Working with Palmer, Smith takes those needs and finds solutions with her digital toolbox.

“I get to do all of the fun stuff. That’s how I look at it,” she said.

Her experience in video production work is paying off to this end. Part of her job includes directing local actors as well as pharmacists in producing instructional videos for class.

For example, Smith has created videos in which pharmacists interact with a patient describing an ill-defined problem without an obvious solution. At the point when the pharmacist has to make a decision based on the information gathered, the video stops, and an active-learning exercise begins. Pharmacy students talk through what they would do in that situation, applying what they’ve learned in class and their readings into an exercise that simulates the kind of tough decisions that pharmacists face.

The instructional videos that Smith produces aren’t exactly like those of her childhood dream job. Unlike Sesame Street, Smith doesn’t get to work with Muppets, and the content she creates is more complex than anything you would find on the beloved TV show. But Smith is happy with her job because it affords her the opportunity to collaborate, to create and to educate.

“We do important work, and we’re valued for what we do,” she said. “I don’t know that I could have found anything more fulfilling than what I do.”