by Michael Mahaffey
Linda Passamaneck is an OU College of Professional and Continuing Studies faculty member, leading the college’s organizational leadership degree completion program. She joined OU in 2023.
How long have you worked for PACS and OU?
I started working for PACS in 2023. Prior to that, I was working with Elsmere Education, which does a lot of work with OU Online. I was the vice president of academic research and design. I did a lot of market research for OU Online in my unit. I wrote over 100 market research reports for OU over about six years. I also worked with the Price College of Business to help them launch their executive MBA in energy program. I helped develop new courses for the College of Law for their MLS programs, so I’ve been working around OU since 2012.
Tell us a little more about your education, professional background and experience, as well as what you do outside of teaching for PACS.
My career didn’t exist when I was in college. I just fell into it, which was really lucky. A lot of my career has focused on the intersection of technology, business and education. I love those three things together. How do we use online programs to provide more access to learners? How do we use them to generate new revenue for institutions? How do we use technology to promote effective learning in an online environment?
I started college at Colorado State University as a psychology major. When I started, e-learning didn’t even exist. I had to work my way through college. I worked full time through the entire undergrad, master’s and Ph.D. journeys, so I can empathize with our adult learners. One of my jobs when I was at Colorado State was in the Division of Continuing Education working with correspondence courses and distance education.
After I got my psychology degree, I earned my master’s in adult education at Colorado State. In 1996, I got a job with Jones Education Company, which did telecourses. They also built their first LMS and moved me over to sales assisting schools that wanted to provide online courses. They sent me to research how to deliver online classes, and I found a company called Real Education, which became E-College, where I worked from 1997 to 2000. There, I worked with the National Association of Realtors, who were building online continuing education courses. I worked with the University of Pennsylvania setting up an advanced student high school program. I worked with the Colorado community college system and colleges and universities all across the country. It was fun to be working at the forefront of everything at a time when universities were very wary of online learning because it was untested.
In 2001, I joined Park University in Parkville, Missouri, as the director of online learning. In 2005, I started my own consulting company called E-Learning Architects. I did independent consulting with institutions across the country, helping them launch degree programs, training faculty, converting courses and walking them through the accreditation process. In 2012, I was approached by a former E-College colleague, Justin McMorrow, who had started Elsmere Education. I had won an RFP bid to do course development work with OU’s Price College of Business, and we launched that program.
I started my Ph.D. program in business management in 2011. When I finished in 2016, I went back to Park University and became a full-time faculty member and the program director for the master’s in organizational leadership program. I did that for a few years while also working full-time for Elsmere.
In 2023, I heard about the new degree completion program OU was launching for adult students. I was lucky enough to get the associate professor position in the organizational leadership program. That’s pretty much my main gig now.
Outside of teaching, I bought an older house in New York. It’s a great house, but it needs a lot of updates and repairs. I do a lot of that work myself—painting, removing wallpaper, and fixing it up. I grew up in the arid west, so I’m getting used to the fact that things grow here. I’m learning how to garden and mow my jungle of a backyard. I’m also in the New Horizons Band here in Rochester. I play the clarinet. When I have a break from teaching, I like to go out and explore the beautiful state of New York. It's pastoral here. People don’t realize so much of New York is a farm state. I take my dogs for hikes and go RVing. I go up to Canada because I live so close.
What is your favorite thing about being an instructor for OU?
A couple of times a term, someone says, “I love that communication model,” or “I love that worksheet we did, and I’m now using that process in my team” or “I went to my boss and made a proposal that we try this new team learning process out.” They’ve been able to implement what we’ve been talking about in class into their jobs immediately. I love hearing, “This has really helped me re-think how I’m interacting with my team.” I love that everyday application. Higher education is a transformative process. It’s supposed to help us become better communicators, collaborators and critical thinkers. But, it can also be very practical and relevant to our daily work. I love having an experience where both of those things are happening at once for the students.
What is your favorite course to teach?
Ethics in Leadership. It’s my favorite course because I know we can do better in the business world being more ethical. There’s always an incredibly large number of cases of poor business behavior to work with, but I think we’re understanding more and more about why good people are put into positions where they have to make poor ethical decisions. I love having students develop their own ethical leadership model that they can take forward with them into their professional practice.
Is there a student or class that has influenced you or made an impact on your life in any way?
I’ve had students who are so incredibly motivating to me. They’ve had spouses pass away. They’ve had a terminal illness. They’ve had job loss. They keep going and finish their degrees. I love hearing from them a few years later, and they’ve gotten promotions. I’ve had students who’ve gone on to work at Facebook, Deloitte, Navy Federal Credit Union and other amazing organizations, and they’ll come back and say, “This program was really influential and it helped me succeed.”
What advice do you have for adult students returning to school?
Expect that the first term is going to be rough. You’re going to have to learn how to schedule your time. You’re going to be reading a lot and scanning content. It is 100% natural to feel overwhelmed in your first term, but don’t give up. Keep going. You’ll make it through. I used to call it the “first-term freak out” when I worked as a student advisor. You’re going to feel a little panicked, a little stressed out, but then you’re going to find a rhythm, and you’re going to excel.
What is your favorite thing about teaching adults?
Adults just bring so much rich experience into the classroom. They have a little bit more of a healthy demand for application than students who haven’t had a lot of professional experience. They need the degree, but they also want the information they’re learning to be applicable right now. They are really hungry for their education to have a relevant impact on their day-to-day lives.
And I learn so much from my students. I learn about accounting methods. I have a student now who runs a train yard, so I’m learning how trains get scheduled and the project management behind that. We learn from each other, and that’s a lot of fun for me, just learning from them about their expertise.
What are the challenges and opportunities that come with teaching courses online?
The challenges are students who don’t connect with you, so sometimes you’re wondering what’s going on. Since you’re not in a face-to-face classroom, you can only meet students where they’re at. If they’re at a place where they don’t have time or interest in connecting with you, that’s cool. If they do the readings, engage in the content and do a great job, then that’s great. But sometimes, students reach out a little too late. You’ve got to be in touch with your faculty member if you’re having any issues. Don’t wait. At the first sign of any questions or trouble or getting behind schedule, tell your instructor. We want you to succeed in our class, in our program and in meeting your goals, professionally and academically.
There are a lot of cool opportunities with new technology. There are a lot of opportunities for students to use AI in the workplace that I’m eager to explore. I want to continue using AI to help them improve their speaking skills. There are some really cool AI tools that will watch you give a presentation and give you feedback on how your presentation is going. There are a lot of new technologies I’m excited about. I’m looking to integrate those into the classroom to make it a richer learning environment for students.
What kind of experience do you want students to have in your courses?
I want them to have an experience steeped in critical thinking. I really want them to embrace thinking critically about the content of the course, what they know about the course, information they’ve read in their workplace, online and in journals. I want them to become critical evaluators of material. We have so much data presented to us now. It used to be “knowledge is power.” I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think the ability to evaluate information and make meaningful judgments about that information is the true power today. I want students to be able to learn information, learn theories, but always have an openness to new data and to be able to consider that information, evaluate it and be able to reformat their thinking on a topic.
One of the classes I teach is Problem Solving and Innovation, and I always tell students you can’t be wrong in how you’re defining a problem. You can come up short in your evaluation, but really thinking critically about it, defining the problem, looking for new perspectives and whatever you do along those lines will improve your ability to make good, valid decisions. When you’re looking at problem-solving and critical thinking, as long as you’re open and willing to look at your own assumptions and biases, you’re going to be a strong critical thinker.
Critical thinking is really diagnosing your own thinking and other people’s thinking and looking for ways to improve it. I think critical thinking is an incredibly important foundation, whether you’re talking about organizational leadership, ethics or effective communication.
What do you do to encourage students to engage with each other? How important is it that they develop a sense of camaraderie/community with each other?
Learning is an inherently relational process, and you can gather information from other people’s perspectives. I utilize peer review in my classes. Peer review doesn’t mean telling someone they did a good job. It means thinking constructively about what feedback I can give someone to help them improve. Many times, we can’t see our own blind spots, but other people can help us. Whether we choose to accept what they tell us is up to us, but we can’t gain perspective from other people without asking for it.
I also think finding people you enjoy speaking with or finding buddies in class that you can speak with is really important. I don’t want students to feel alone. Yes, they can talk to me anytime, but it’s also nice to have folks in class who can encourage each other. Plus, I think it’s really important for students to form networks with each other for job hunting, working on projects, sharing ideas and things like that. Forming a community is really important, and I do that through group work, peer reviews, video calls and all sorts of different tools. Students tell me all the time, “I love seeing my classmates’ faces, not just seeing their names on paper.” Just as I get a perspective into their lives, they get a perspective into each other’s lives. And they share a lot. Yes, we all have work to do, but we’re also human beings with sick kids, work trips and everything that competes with our time as students.
OU Online loves to showcase the exceptional instructors who teach our online master’s and bachelor’s degree courses. If you know an instructor who would make an interesting feature, please email us at online@ou.edu.
