Pamela Luckett is the chief digital engagement officer at Dallas College Brookhaven Campus. She works to enhance communication within the digital network of Brookhaven Campus and Dallas College as a whole. Luckett regularly corresponds with every division and department at Brookhaven, from academic affairs to student life. She converses with staff and students alike to gauge their needs.
She also works with Dallas College stakeholders, making sure their problems are heard and quickly solved. Whether it comes in the form of helping transition the college’s learning management resource, or ensuring the information technology department is aware of any current issues,
Luckett’s position comes with vast responsibility and a heavy workload. We interviewed Luckett to learn more about her position.
Could you give a brief description of the position of chief digital engagement officer at Dallas College?
The chief digital engagement officer position was an inaugural position.
So this was a new unit. When this particular position was actually created, it was created as a way of making sure we had a team who could interact directly with our functional stakeholders to be able to help them with their particular problems, really serving as a thought partner whereby they would have someone who they could come to and talk to about whatever they were experiencing, whether or not they were missing something in supporting a student or a particular solution that would improve operational efficiency or they were just looking at something to improve the experience of the student.
So instead of us always going out to look for something new, guess what? This particular group will go and look to see what we already have and how we can ensure that we’re leveraging before we even consider moving to something else.
So it’s a thought partnership to be able to make sure that we’re utilizing our digital ecosystem effectively.
When did you first begin working in this position?
I had spent 22 years in Florida at Barry University down in Miami, Florida, where I served as an associate dean over enrollment management and operations for 22 of our satellite locations.
When I came here, this was a new experience and I was excited.
So when I initially joined this particular team, I was the deputy director of innovation which meant that I oversaw our Information Technology umbrella. And so after joining I was in that position for about four years and then applied to serve as the chief digital engagement officer, which is the fun part because that’s the part that enables you to really form and maintain relationships, really trying to figure out, you know, what is it that they need.
What does a regular workday in the Spring or Fall look like for you and your department?
What things look like is making sure that we have all of our teams positioned at the start of each semester to make sure we are all accessible so we can be able to resolve any kind of issue that comes about, especially during those first two weeks, the week before classes start all the way through the first two weeks. If a student is experiencing an issue, we have to make sure the team can resolve those issues quickly.
So we are preparing our teams to make sure that they can quickly be able to resolve issues.
If we’re seeing a degradation in services or a delegation in performances, we can quickly be able to look at that now.
In addition to looking at what’s happening with students or faculty as they are starting the semester, making sure everybody is in their classes, and they can access classes, we also begin to look at other initiatives that we are working on, maybe for the next semester coming up.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
The only thing I want to say is I think that the digital engagement team is a very focal point and every time I have this conversation with people because they’re like, “Ohh, what does digital engagement do though?” Because when you search for it online, it is like the title is a blend of IT and marketing.
So it’s not a marketing type of position, although we collaborate very heavily with marketing and very heavily with IT because you know we all have to work together because they handle the communication umbrella of anything that we do. So I think that this kind of helps all of our stakeholders because our team speaks the layman terms and we also speak the tech terms as well.
I think when this particular role was envisioned by our chancellor, He was really thinking about how can I provide more support and services to our stakeholders so they have someone they can actually go and engage with who should be able to help them think about what types of things can we integrate in our digital ecosystem platform to be able to provide a better experience in engagement outlet for our students, for our faculty and for our staff. We also have our external partners and they’re working through the procurement process.
Anyone who thinks about a process improvement, something we can do to make things better, they can always submit that to digital engagement and we will start to investigate.
It could be an easy quick fix or it may be something that is on our long term plan to actually integrate.
