Why I Teach: Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Why I Teach: Dr. Melanie B. Richards
In this episode, Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle talks with Dr. Melanie B. Richards, interim director of ETSU’s new School of Marketing and Media, about how her experience in the corporate world led to a career in academia.
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Transcript
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
I hope that students leave my classroom with technical skills, critical thought ability, problem-solving, and creativity in how they approach problems, and that ability to make ethical decisions. But beyond that, I really hope that my students know that I care about them.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
Hi. I'm Kimberly McCorkle, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at East Tennessee State University. From the moment I arrived on this campus, I have been inspired by our faculty, their passion for what they do, their belief in the power of higher education, and the way they are transforming the lives of their students. This podcast is dedicated to them: our incredible faculty at ETSU. Hear their stories as they tell us "Why I Teach."
In this episode, we will talk with Dr. Melanie B. Richards. Dr. Richards is an associate professor in the ETSU Department of Media and Communications Brand Communication program. This fall, she was appointed interim director of ETSU's new School of Marketing and Media. She also serves as the graduate program coordinator for the Master of Arts in Brand Media Strategy.
She's been working in the research, analytics, and account planning world for over 20 years, and prior to ETSU, spent the majority of her career working for both Fortune 500 companies and major nonprofit organizations in various marketing leadership roles. Her academic research primarily focuses on brand experience, particularly regarding the intersection of AI and other new technologies, and on the scholarship of teaching and learning. She's the co-author of the department's published Experiential Approach to Teaching and Student Learning: The Applied Marketing and Media Education Norm. She's also published a breadth of research regarding cost-based communication, public health communication, and intergenerational communication and dynamics in the workplace. Enjoy the show.
Dr. Richards, welcome to the show.
I start my podcast with the same question for every guest. Take me back to your first day of teaching at ETSU as a faculty member, and looking back on that day, what is one piece of advice that you would have given yourself?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Provost McCorkle. I'm really excited about this opportunity to share my experiences and kind of what I've learned over the time that I've been here at ETSU. So when I reflect back on my first day at ETSU about eight and a half years ago, I remember feeling a great sense of imposter syndrome.
At the time, I had had a generous amount of industry experience. I had led teams in the workforce, but teaching felt like a very different kind of challenge. And I knew that I didn't have the wealth of experience that many of my colleagues had in the classroom. I was very focused on getting my syllabus perfect and trying to practice and practice these different pedagogical strategies and being able to deliver those really effectively. I critically kind of looked at everything I was doing and really thought about, you know, where could I be doing better? And I worried a lot about that.
I think too much when I should have just gone in and, if I could go back and tell myself to do this, focused on the relationship building. Because that's the same in the classroom as it is in a professional work environment. If I had focused on that and built those connections, created an environment where students want to be there and want to learn, empowered them to do that, supported that learning, and gave myself the flexibility to adapt as needed—I think that first semester would have gone even smoother than it did.
Fortunately, I had a lot of wonderful students that gave me a lot of grace as I made those adaptations, and I think that it went well in the end. But if I had started with that footing, I think it could have gone even better.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
Thank you for that. That's a great story and a reminder about relationship building and how important that is to teaching.
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Right.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
What inspired you to transition from the corporate world to academia?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
So my favorite part of my industry role, no matter which position I was in, was always the mentoring aspect. So building a team and then mentoring those individuals to be able to achieve their professional goals and develop their skill set and really hone their craft. And I wanted to really dig into that even more. And I felt like teaching gave me that opportunity to do that to this next generation of marketing and media professionals that we see coming into the program.
And I really feel like it has given me that ability to empower those students to be able to mentor them, both with the knowledge and skill set, but then also that ethical responsibility that I think they need to have in place as they're going into the industry. And enabled them to make a meaningful difference in their career, in their lives, and in the world around them.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
So tell us a bit more about how you incorporate the extensive industry experience into your teaching methods.
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
So my industry experience is pretty critical, I would say, in the approach that I take when I'm teaching. There is kind of the basic application, so I'll bring in examples from my career, from the American Cancer Society, Teach for America, Delta Airlines, different stops I've had along the way, and talk to students about here's how we approach this problem or how we developed this understanding of our audience. When we were confronted with this situation at those different organizations, and I do that, you know, in my typical discussions with students, and as we're thinking about how do we apply different principles?
I typically teach our research and analytics courses at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. So I can actually bring in examples of where we've applied different kinds of research in those industries' roles, and talk about the challenges that those helped to inform and solve.
The other way I incorporate my industry experience is through the development of two learning models that I've been very fortunate to work with some great colleagues and develop while I've been at ETSU. The first was the Applied Marketing and Media Education Norm, which I developed with Dr. Stephen Marshall, and that was early in my career at ETSU, when I first came here. And then more recently, I co-developed the Artificial Intelligence for Service Learning and Experiential Education Model with Dr. Chelsea Dubay.
And so both of those incorporate industry partnerships within our approach to experiential education. And so I'm able to bring in not just my historical experience, but very current experience working with industry partners into what the students are working on as far as projects in the classroom.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
That's great. And do these models then kind of work across the department? So are your colleagues kind of using those as well?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Yes. And broader, is what we're seeing now, which is really exciting. So the Applied Marketing and Media Education Norm is our department's general approach to how we partner with regional organizations and community organizations, and how we teach students in an applied way, very practical, hands-on skill set. But in that environment where they're facing challenges that may not be on your creative brief and they're having to navigate and adapt to those, we see that model being applied across a lot of courses within our curriculum, which is exciting.
And then the Artificial Intelligence for Service Learning and Experiential Education Model, we call it, is also being adopted more broadly, which is exciting to see across the School of Marketing and Media and across the broader college as well.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
It's great.
So as mentioned and as you know, the recent academic restructure that was implemented this year, as part of that, ETSU created a school structure in several colleges. So you're now serving as the interim director of the new School of Marketing and Media. I know you're excited about interdisciplinary student learning opportunities across departments, as you just said, and that this school will help facilitate some of that, the ability to be able to do that.
Will you tell us about some of these opportunities that you're most excited about with the school structure?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Yes. So, as you referenced, those interdisciplinary student opportunities, and faculty opportunities, are extremely exciting to me. I think we're seeing that start to play out in a few different ways.
Project-based learning, as I mentioned, is a very core part of our department's approach, but it's also a very core part of the other two departments that are in the school in their approach to learning.
So, within the school, we have the Department of Media and Communication, the Department of Digital Media, and the Department of Marketing.
All three of those areas have very exciting opportunities to work with different regional partners together. So that's what we're starting to see happen a little bit more.
We have plans in place to create a more formal student agency to be able to help support those partnerships in a more formalized way with deep subject matter expertise and skill sets.
So you may be working with a cross-disciplinary team of marketing students, digital media students, and media and communications students. Or you may have a more focused engagement with specific students with certain skill sets.
But we want to bring that offering to the region to better support our community organizations, our business partners, and to be able to do so in a way where they don't have to go to Knoxville or go to Nashville to find an agency partner that is going to be able to support what they're looking for, for their organization.
They can do it right here in their own backyard. We're developing those students' experience for their portfolios, and we're meeting the organization's needs at the same time. So I'm very excited about that opportunity.
Another thing we were looking at, too, is to increase our national competition presence. We already have a great student team that works together, from digital media and media and communication for the National Student Advertising Competition.
We want to bring in more marketing students into that opportunity. And we're also looking at offerings from the American Marketing Association as far as competitions they offer, where that cross-disciplinary team would do really, really well.
So those are a couple opportunities that we're very excited about, and I'm looking forward to building out more in the spring.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
I'm just thrilled to hear about all of that. I know there is a lot of excitement across the campus about this new school, and I think adding all of those opportunities across these departments that have already been so strong and very student-focused, I think will be really beneficial.
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Yeah. Thank you.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
So you've been doing work around AI and its impact on teaching. What challenges and opportunities do you see with AI technology in the classroom?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
So I know when we came in, I had asked you if you had heard of this book that I'm holding here. It's Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. I'm a big fan of Dr. Mollick's work. He's at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania, and he suggests four principles to how we should work with AI.
So, when Dr. Dubay and I were developing our model for education within the classroom, we leaned into a lot of what Dr. Mollick had suggested.
First is invite AI to the table. So, let's not be afraid. Let's dig in.
And in my daily practice, when I'm working, I typically have ChatGPT 4 open the entire time. I use it as a brainstorming partner, for idea generation, for evolving work that I'm currently putting forward.
Really it is that kind of thought partner and also a provider for critical feedback that I can then incorporate and edit.
So I ask students to do the same thing.
I also have built, because I didn't have course assistance in a human way, I've built course assistance in a chat-based way for my courses.
So I will load my course documentation into a chat portal, where I basically have created a private environment that students can engage with any questions they may have on my syllabi.
Questions they may have on my course content. And that's a resource to students that may be a little bit easier to engage with and more comfortable in a conversational way for them to engage with.
I've also asked students to bring it into project incorporation, again, to that, invite AI to the table.
We talk about how can we be applying AI as we're developing better research questions, or we're thinking about application of different methodologies.
How could AI potentially help us with qualitative content analysis? We look into those applications and how can we maybe do things better or differently, but still in an ethical way as we move forward?
Mollick's second rule is still to be the human in the loop. So we talk a lot about that.
When we talk about ethical application of AI, it's not just I'm going to set it and forget it.
And that oversight, his other two roles as far as AI is to assign AI a role.
So we talk a lot about the formal term, which is prompt engineering, and how to effectively treat AI like a human while keeping in mind that it's not. Ask it questions and give it direction that is well-informed and gets to what we want to see as far as outputs.
The other thing I remind students is his last principle, which is that the AI you are using now is the worst you will ever see. Just in the time that he wrote his book, published in early 2024, we've seen so much change and increased capability. What I'm primarily speaking to is what generative AI can do and how it can play a role in our daily lives and our work.
Just keep thinking about that incorporation and be thoughtful about the different ways it may be able to help you in your work and potentially in your life moving forward.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
That's fascinating. A really good overview of ways to use it. What's your student response been so far?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
They're first a little timid, I think, because they're not sure, "Okay. Wait, is this okay? Am I really being given permission or encouragement even to be able to use these tools?" I think that's because of the way we saw generative AI kind of roll out. The important thing, though, is those ethical guardrails.
That's something actually that Dr. Trena Paulus and I have been doing research on as well. There's a lot of capability that AI gives us, but without being that human in the loop, without really understanding the application, things can go off the rails pretty quickly.
Once students have those ethical guardrails in place and they understand that, yes, it's being encouraged, but we're going to use it in a very principled way—and here's how you do that—then they get really excited.
I had one student I saw at Starbucks, actually at the Culp, the other day, and she said, "Dr. Richards, I assumed you would be okay with this, but I wanted to let you know I did use AI in our qualitative analysis with the community partner data that we were working with. It was de-identified data. I felt good about it, and I think it was really helpful."
I said, "Of course, I'm okay with that. I love that you're exploring that. That's really exciting." We talked about what she had learned and some of the recommendations they were able to make for the partner because of that.
I think students, once they feel like they have permission, are very excited about the potential.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
It's great. Are you assigning the book as part of the class?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Yes. I've learned something about myself: that if I really want to read a text, the best way I can do that is to assign it as part of my curriculum. So I did that with that textbook. I assigned it within my graduate course to those students, and then some excerpts for my undergraduates.
As I mentioned to you, I'm excited. I've had the book and have not had a chance to read it yet, but I suspect, based on your good analysis, it might be something we want the campus to engage with.
I think the campus community would really enjoy the text. It's a very approachable read. You could really cover it in a weekend, and I think it's very worthwhile.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
That's great. You're also an advocate for ETSU's Go Beyond the Classroom Community-Engaged Learning Initiative. In what ways do you incorporate community-engaged learning into your classes, and what have been some of the results you've seen so far?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Yes, I am a very big proponent of community-engaged learning. I'm originally from this area. I grew up on the border of Carter County and Unicoi County, so I'm deeply entrenched as far as my connections to this community.
If we can serve the community in the work that we're doing, benefit student learning outcomes, and benefit community partners, while providing a really exciting environment for them to learn and improve their engagement with the content and application of their skills, then why wouldn't I want to do that?
I incorporate community-engaged learning in pretty much every course I teach. In all of our research and analytics courses, both at the undergraduate and graduate level within our department, we work with different partners across the community every semester.
Students get the ability to challenge themselves because things don't always go to plan. Sometimes you have to navigate unexpected situations.
One example, just this semester, was when one of our clients we were working with was Main Street Elizabethton. At the very start of the semester, we discussed a project that would do some research into what community members want to see in the downtown area to help revitalize and encourage the growth that they've already had. You know, new business ideas. Are there new dining options, things of that nature? Then Hurricane Helene hit. And so we had to very quickly kind of pivot and understand what the current need was. Did we need to adapt some of the questions that we were going to be asking to be sensitive to the fact that there was this natural disaster that had affected a lot of those community members that we were going to be speaking with their lives very directly? So I think it was a great experience for the students again, to kind of build that flexibility, and have that real-world project experience where they had to navigate some unexpected challenges.
The exciting part of that community-engaged learning experience then came at the end when we were presenting back the results to the client. Where things may have felt a little off the rails to the students in the middle, they saw it all come together at the end. And to watch that recognition as they were presenting and seeing the impact they were having on the community partner, you can't beat that. You can't get that in other types of learning models or pedagogical applications. And so that's why I love it so much and believe it's so impactful on our students.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
That's great. That's a great example. What unique elements does the brand and media strategy program offer to its students? And how do you ensure that it stays relevant in a rapidly-changing industry?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
Oh, good questions. So, the Brand Media strategy graduate program, I think is unique amongst some of our other offerings within the school and more broadly within the university. We are an on-ground program, primarily very hands-on, very experiential. So students are learning how to develop content at a very high-quality level of expectations. They're shooting and editing brand videos. They're creating digital ads. They're building social media campaigns. They answer real partners' challenges. And so they're developing that, again, content production at a very kind of high level of quality and level of expectations. But they're also getting the theoretical connections as far as why we do what we do and why we are approaching it in certain ways.
We're staying ahead of industry trends, I think, in a few different ways. One I'll highlight specifically is within the research that is coming out of the program. So the program is also unique in that it offers either a capstone experience in a project-based way in the second year or a thesis. So students can choose, you know, which path makes the most sense for their career trajectory. Do they want to go on to a Ph.D. program? Are they wanting to go directly into an industry role? And the research that's being completed by our thesis students is really pushing us, I think, to stay on top of those industry trends.
So just a few examples of current thesis students that I'm chairing right now. I have a student that is looking at virtual reality and augmented reality and application, and how that affects brand perceptions. I have another student who's looking at AI incorporation and content production. And how does that evolve how we potentially teach those methods of content production? It's really exciting because it's a beneficial thing to the students as far as their research output and then where it sets them up for a next stage in their path. But it also helps us as a department because then we can bring those learnings into our curriculum.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
Yeah, it's nice. What's the most fulfilling part of your work as a professor?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
I believe I would say the growth that happens that you see just over the course of a semester. So I mentioned the Main Street, Elizabethton project earlier, but in any of our community-engaged learning projects that we do, you see the students come in and they're initially a little hesitant, and, you know, if a challenge comes up, they're not sure how to navigate it. And just a little unsure of themselves. But to watch that confidence build as they are applying what they're learning in the class and they are, you know, gaining that self-assurance, and watching them be able then to come to the end of the semester and present that in a very confident way, and know that they are not just applying it to that course, but it's something that will likely stick with them and they can apply broadly in life and in future work environments. That really is exciting to me. And I would say it's the most fulfilling aspect of what I do.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
Finally, what impact do you hope you've made on your students?
Dr. Melanie B. Richards
So I hope that students leave my classroom with technical skills, critical thought ability, problem-solving, and creativity.
The best feeling that I have, from, you know, the experience is when a student comes back to me a year or two later and has just asked to have coffee or says, "Hey, I'm running into this issue within my job. Can you help me think through this?" I love those lifelong connections, and it's something that was kind of unexpected to me coming into this role. How often that would happen.
So that is, I would say, the impact that I hope I have. It's not just the technical aspects or the skill-based aspects or even the critical thought aspects. It's the connection piece and that they feel comfortable coming back to me for that support and guidance along the way. I really want them to know I care about them. And especially, as you know, I was a first-generation student myself. I think that you may not have that in other areas of your life.
So if I can be that to our students and not just while they're in the classroom, but beyond. I want to do that. So that's how I would answer.
Provost Kimberly D. McCorkle
Thank you.
Thank you, Melanie. I enjoyed our conversation today, and I appreciate your deep commitment to community-engaged learning at ETSU and your work and student success.
Thanks for listening to Why I Teach. For more information about Dr. Richards, the College of Business and Technology, or this podcast series, visit the ETSU Provost website at ETSU dot EDU slash Provost. You can follow me on social media at ETSU Provost. And if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like and subscribe to Why I Teach wherever you listen to podcasts.
East Tennessee State University was founded in 1911 with a singular mission: to improve the quality of life for people in the region and beyond. Through its world-class health sciences programs and interprofessional approach to health care education, ETSU is a highly respected leader in rural health research and practices. The university also boasts nationally ranked programs in the arts, technology, computing, and media studies. ETSU serves approximately 14,000 students each year and is ranked among the top 10 percent of colleges in the nation for students graduating with the least amount of debt.
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