Amanda Folk

When Amanda Folk arrived at Ohio State in 2016, she began working immediately with the Drake Institute. She quickly joined the small group of colleagues who were developing the Endorsements program, helping to shape the purpose of this new credential and the criteria for evaluating endorsement applications.

After the Drake Institute had officially launched the Endorsement program, her immediate priority was to develop offerings that University Libraries could contribute to the program. To do this, she reworked a vacant Instructional Design Librarian position to become the Teaching & Learning Engagement Librarian. The primary role of this redesigned tenure-track faculty position is to develop robust instructor development programming in collaboration with university teaching and learning partners, particularly the Drake Institute. The creation of this position has been successful, and the Libraries were able to offer two endorsements within a year of hiring Jane Hammons into the position. She led the development of one the endorsements - the Meaningful Inquiry endorsement, which is a collaboration between University Libraries, Writing Across the Curriculum, and the Newark campus.

In addition to her work with the Drake Institute, she is also active in supporting other teaching and learning partners at the university and beyond. Until recently, she was the University Libraries’ primary liaison to the Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) and worked closely with Dr. Shanna Jaggars and her team in Research & Program Assessment in the Office of Student Academic Success (OSAS) on the research study investigating the impact of the first couple of ALX cohorts.