"Logic Job": The Email That Changed My Career

(The Aplia homepage, circa 2008, retrieved from Archive.org)

Some life changes are gradual. But sometimes life—and your career—can turn on a dime. In 2008 I was a struggling philosophy graduate student living in Santa Cruz, California, one of the most expensive parts of one of the most expensive states in the country, teaching as an adjunct philosophy instructor at Cabrillo College and having been a teaching fellow and lecturer for Introduction to Logic at UC Santa Cruz—when, one day, I received the following email out of the blue. I didn’t know it at the time, but this one email would change the course of my entire career as a philosopher and educational technologist:

Subject: Logic Job

Zachary,

I'm the executive editor at Aplia, an educational technology division of Cengage Learning. We're planning to create an online homework product for logic and we thought you could recommend someone to help us develop this product and write the online assignments.

We're looking for someone who has taught logic, has great writing skills, and is passionate about logic and education. We'll consider graduate students looking for their next step as well as more experienced instructors looking to take on a significant project. Depending on the candidate, we are open to project-based contract positions as well as full-time, salaried positions.

Do you know of anyone who fits this description? This is a key position for us, and finding the right person makes all the difference. Recommendations really help!

Thank you so much for you time. I've included a job description below.

Best,
Kristen

Kristen Ford
Executive Editor
Aplia Inc.  

I very nearly didn’t reply to this email, although in retrospect it is clear that I was the perfect person for the role, perhaps providentially so. I remember my first phone-screening interview with Kristen Ford, then executive editor at Aplia, vividly. It was something of a scare-talk actually, talking up the complex, XML-based authoring environment used at Aplia—what I would later learn was a highly customized version of Arbortext—to see if the technical challenges of the job phased me or if I had the kind of technical acumen that would allow me to rise to the occasion, not merely as a content writer and author but someone who could handle the XML programing aspect of the job (using variables to randomize content so different users would receive different versions of each problem, working with Aplia’s Chief Technical Officer and software engineer, Rick Meyers, to develop interactive logic tools—interactive Venn diagrams, an interactive proof-checker tool for propositional and predicate logic, an argument diagramming tool, and so on).

I remember my response to Kristen’s description of the complexity of the XML-based authoring environment and her asking whether I thought I would be able to adapt quickly to it. My response was something to the effect of “Well, I’m familiar with HTML because I have some experience writing websites in HTML,” referring to the fact that I had created my own Geocities website in the late 1990s. “So that doesn’t bother me; I can learn to use the authoring environment easily enough,” I said confidently—perhaps overly confidently.

I still look back on this moment as one in which forward momentum is life is more about the art of saying “Yes!” than about one’s actual skills or experience. Although many people have experience teaching logic and philosophy, and perhaps many of them received the same email. I was the one for whom the door was opening in that particular moment, and it was up to me to walk through it—the act of walking through an unknown door itself always being an existential act of faith.

I had a very successful run at Aplia, spending my first 14 months there creating highly engaging and interactive online courseware, learning materials, ad interactive tools to accompany the most widely-used logic textbook on the market, from any of the major educational publishing companies, Patrick Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic, the textbook from which I myself first learned logic and critical thinking and which I had subsequently used in my own logic and critical thinking courses ever since. Barely realizing myself what a major change I had undergone in such a short period of time, in those 14 months I had gone from a struggling grad student and adjunct instructor to a Senior Content Developer (later Senior Learning Design Author) at one of the most successful most innovative educational technology companies that had become a division of one of the largest education publishing companies in the world. I had become not only a courseware writer but an educational technologist, content developer, instructional designer, XML programmer, and content architect, all wrapped into one—not to mention a sales trainer as I trained sales reps on the nuances of selling the logic product I had just developed, and even a support rep as I supported the product through its entire lifecycle, from handing support tickets to implementing any necessary bug fixes and revisions.

I had become more versatile—and more innovative—than I ever realized I was or could be. And it was all because I took a chance on replying to that random email from Kristen Ford at Aplia, which I would later come to find out was merely because I happened to have been on a list of instructors who were already adopting the Hurley logic textbook in their courses. And while there many qualified possible candidates for the Aplia role I would be given, in retrospect I did have a unique skillset and personality that allowed me uniquely to succeed in the role and create a product that would prove to be an order of magnitude more innovative, engaging, interactive, and successful than the product t might have been had it been developed by someone other than me and the collaboration partners and philosophy writers I would bring into the fold as well (Brian Prosser, Jessica Samuels), not to mention the entire team of Aplia technologists, engineers, sales and support teams, editorial staff (such as my former boss, managing editor, and still friend, Paul Wells, and the many project editors and content engineers who shepherded the content through the entire editorial and production process—the unsung heroes who were the quiet workhorses of the Aplia content production process.

I remained on the Aplia content team for eight years, and I would go on to develop, author, and program Aplia online courseware products for Critical Thinking (The Art of Argument by George Rainbolt and Sandra Dwyer and Critical Thinking: A User’s Manual by Debra Jackson and Paul Newberry) and Introduction to Philosophy (Archetypes of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy by Douglas J. Soccio and Philosophy: A Text with Readings by Manuel Velasquez), and I would even author Aplia content for Personal Finance (Personal Finance by E. Thomas Garman and Raymond Forgue). And I would go on to train and mentor Aplia content developers and learning design authors in countless other disciplines as well. Even as I saw Aplia the team get progressively subsumed into—nay, cannibalized by—its parent company, eventually being incorporated into Cengage’s then-new MindTap product offerings, even joking that I was on the quarterly layoff plan, seeing friends and colleagues getting laid off every three months—those of us that remained in the vestiges of the Aplia content team still held fast to our hunger for real innovation and to create the highest-quality educational content and online learning materials possible.

After eight years on such an innovative online educational content team with a thirst to continue developing online educational content, when my number came up and my position was finally eliminated, as big companies tend to do when cannibalizing little companies, I couldn’t stomach merely going back to being a poor, struggling adjunct instructor, not when I had an unquenchable thirst to keep creating online learning materials and not when I now had such a nuanced understanding of the business model that makes it possible for educational technology companies to thrive in a way that creates a genuine win-win-win situation for teachers, students, and the educational technology companies themselves. My career would change directions yet again as I moved into what is more properly called “instructional design” as opposed to educational content development, per se. But I could no longer, and perhaps still can no longer, go back to considering myself a mere philosopher—even as I once again teach philosophy at the local community college extremely part-time. The hunger in me to create in the educational technology space is too great, and I’ve been too successful in educational technology and instructional design, to reverse course entirely. And it’s all because I took a chance in responding to a random email from Aplia on that fateful day in 2008, the email that would change the course of my career—with no turning back.