American Public Garden Association is proud to announce the launch of Public Garden Academy. Our professional development experience is getting a major upgrade. Check out our interview with APGA Digital Content Coordinator, Caitlin Simkovich, about building a better way to grow your career.
ACADEMY INSIDER
Behind the Build with Caitlin Simkovich
What is the Public Garden Academy?
Caitlin Simkovich: Our new learning hub, where you’ll go to attend live events like webinars, revisit on-demand recordings, and access courses. As a member of the Association, you’ll be able to access most courses and all resources at no additional cost (free). All courses are self-paced, so that you can learn at your own speed and find courses based on your specific professional development goals.
How does the Academy make professional development better?
CS: We’ve known that our members need a better and easier way to access public garden resources. It’s clear that our current Library & Media Center is not very user-friendly. To put it plainly, we’ve outgrown it.
Association staff and our Professional Communities are busier and more engaged than ever producing professional development content and events. We needed a platform that can keep up and grow with us.
One of the largest problems we all face is too much to do and too little time to do it. The Academy makes the most of members’ time by putting everything in one place and allowing users to build their own libraries of resources and courses they can return to whenever they have a moment. It really meets our members where they are, and that isn’t always at a desk.
The Disaster Readiness course is just one example of a better professional development experience. The new material is designed to be interactive with knowledge checkpoints and embedded discussion.
Where should new users start?
CS: Once you log in, you’ll notice right away that there’s a lot to explore. Don’t panic. A logical place to start is with our “How to Navigate the Academy” course. This will give you a comprehensive overview of the Academy and tips for searching the content. If you’re someone who prefers to just dive right in and start exploring, we say go for it! There are guides all over the platform to help inform and direct you.
What do you say to members worried about platform fatigue or the learning curve of adopting a new platform?
CS: We totally get it. We’ve implemented a LOT of change over the last several years. Our hope is that we’ve been thoughtful and strategic enough about the purpose of each of our platforms and that it’s clear where you go for what without constantly bouncing from one platform to next. That, depending on what your goal is, you know the exact location to achieve it.
| WHERE YOU GO | WHAT YOU FIND |
|---|---|
| Public Garden Academy | where you can participate in live events (like webinars) and self-paced, personalized learning |
| Community Forums | where you can find your people and connect in real-time discussions and share relevant resources with one anothe |
| Event Websites | large-scale events like the Annual Conference and Symposia will still be housed on their own websites |
| Library & Media Center | older resources can still be found in our Library & Media Center while we migrate materials to the Academy, where information is easy to search and save |
What is your favorite feature?
CS: I love that the system can recommend courses* to you based on interests you include in your profile. If you’re interested in a specific topic or area of development, you can filter to see all relevant courses in one place, instead of hunting everything down individually in our vast library of recordings and resources. We are actively working on creating and adding “bundles”, or packages of courses that are all under the same theme or topic. This will allow for a deep dive into a theme or topic in one easy enrollment click.
Another cool thing that we couldn’t do before is recommend courses to you based on interests you include in your profile. Lastly, you’ll be able to keep track of any courses you take, or want to take, all in one place in the “My Courses” section. You’ll also be able to revisit these courses as many times as you want or need.
*Course is our term for any Academy live program, on-demand recording, e-learning package, or resource.
