I have always been advocate of online education and the pedagogy of a flipped classroom, and have done enough of it to understand what works and what doesn’t when sharing information and taking or teaching classes asynchronously. My first online class was in 2008. I was working as an in-home therapist in Louisiana and wanted to start a doctoral program to have credibility as an author and tv-show host. My town did not have any university with doctoral level programs within a two-hour drive, so working and going to school would have been impossible at that time.
My doctoral education experience is a topic for another time, as I am now fiscally and emotionally recovered, but in short, I completed my degree online and even took time to do two different online certificate programs concurrently, one in college counseling, and another in online teaching. I was setting myself up to be able to teach at the university level, and I anticipated online education taking off. After all that learning, I couldn’t get any online teaching work at the university level, I gained no credibility from my doctoral education, and no one bought any of the books I had written. I had bought all the materials need to podcast and create videos, but was too much of a perfectionist and feared not being taken seriously, so I never took the leap to put out content.
Having moved into the international counseling field, I was able to integrate technology into my practice. Something all counselors recognize is a deficit in the amount of time we have to share face-to-face with students in classrooms and with other stakeholders like parents and teachers. Instead of simply fitting in when I was scheduled for 30 minutes here and there with the different age groups, I started to use the tools available to me to create a virtual counseling program that matched the process I use for in-person counseling, and gave me an outlet to express my counselor self in the digital environment. When Covid came, I realized that this was the time to start putting myself and my work out there to help anyone with limited resources or role models for what to do in the future, and to help other counselors along their journey.
