In many ways, Velvet Weems-Landingham, Ph.D., was made for this moment.
Having earned her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior, her academic focus is on virtual work and distance learning. She has worked in the industry for 20 years, designing, developing, and managing training and consulting initiatives for a wide array of organizations. An Associate Professor in the College of Business Administration at Kent State University at Geauga, Dr. Landingham designs and teaches online and blended courses, including leadership and human resource management, global management, and advanced professional development for the Department of Management and Information Systems.
Dr. Landingham says that she felt adequately prepared for all of the shifts to online operations that the pandemic forced upon society this past year. “I had already been acclimating my students to learning remotely and using online collaborative tools to work remotely because this is the direction the world has been going anyway,” she says.
”I am so proud of my students. They didn’t miss a beat! I hope to continue to integrate these collaborative long-distance tools into the students’ education experience going forward.”
Considering Dr. Landingham’s expertise in the field, she has also been in a position to help guide colleagues through online learning and community business leaders through remote collaboration tools. For instance, she has led discussions with colleagues on best practices, time management, and virtual team leadership related to online learning; and facilitated a Best Practices Workshop for the Geauga Growth Partnership.
Dr. Landingham has also leveraged this pandemic period to develop new distance-based programs and write related articles for professional journals.
“Reflecting on and Renovating Teaching Evaluations within Non-Traditional Classrooms” is a 60-minute roundtable session that Dr. Landingham designed to promote instructor reflection on traditional teaching evaluations, and offers ways to improve performance through the integration of varied tools and techniques. This session is designed to improve student assessment and instructor performance by reinventing teaching evaluations and addressing new, varied approaches to teaching and learning.
“Technostress: A Holistic Definition” recognizes technostress as a form of stress resulting from technology use. It has long been described as a disease resulting from individuals’ inabilities to cope with technology in a healthy way. This paper enlists stress research to derive a holistic definition of technostress, explaining the influence of technology on existing stressors, incorporating the impact of technostress conditions, outlining varying responses to technology adoption, and making room for an appreciative approach of technostress.
“Help Me Help You! Using Asynchronous Discussions to Improve Online Student Success” focuses on instructors’ struggles to forge online student engagement critical to academic success. This 90-minute experiential exercise describes how asynchronous online discussions (check-ins throughout the grading period) can be designed and implemented to help instructors understand and meet student needs, thus improving student outcomes, instruction evaluations, and teaching effectiveness.
In an effort to further magnify her leadership potential in the field, Dr. Landingham recently underwent rigorous coaching certification at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, learning how to coach individuals in self development, professional development, and leadership skills.
The Gestalt Institute offers coaching training and certification through the International Coaching Federation (ICF), a world-renowned institute for developing practitioners and researchers in the art of coaching and mentoring. By conducting assessments in emotional intelligence and personality traits, coaches help clients to gain self-awareness, set goals and priorities, accept accountability, and take actionable steps to improve outcomes.
“Achieving coaching certification through the Gestalt Institute will provide me with a solid foundation for the study of coaching, located at the intersection of Organizational Behavior (my Ph.D. area of study) and Human Resource Management disciplines,” Dr. Landingham says. She has planned several research outcomes resulting from this certification, including a reflective paper and a review paper, research streams, and related subject areas ripe for future study.
In addition, Dr. Landingham points to a host of positive Geauga Campus impacts associated with her coaching certification, including coaching and mentoring efforts for student retention, student development, professional development, publication success for national and international recognition, plus conference presentations, speaking, and coaching engagements highlighting Geauga Campus expertise.
“Remote work has been here since the ‘90s and the .coms,” says Dr. Landingham. “But the pandemic has brought the online world to the foreground, shedding light on the opportunities that exist on this platform. As an institution of higher learning — and specifically at the College of Business — we need to demonstrate flexibility in terms of format availability in order to make the most of these opportunities.”