Name: Claire Winthrop
Title: Director of JoVE Customer Success
Degree: Master of Business Administration, Suffolk University
Tell me about what you do.
I came on board to build a team to help our existing subscribers become aware of JoVE content, and use it in the classroom and in the lab. To do this, I hire professionals, and train and support them so that they can help our subscribers remove obstacles to JoVE usage. I started around a year ago with one person, and now our team has 12.
Can you discuss subscriber problems?
With electronic resources such as JoVE, the librarians make the purchase decisions based on recommendations from faculty members. But not all faculty in the relevant departments are aware the librarians have made the purchase, and that these resources are available. That’s a gap.
Librarians are sometimes physically located in different places from the faculty departments. They are also responsible for a lot: doing outreach to students, maintaining system databases, and performing discovery services, as well as supporting faculty research. They often don’t have the time or expertise or authority to do as much as our team can. That leaves faculty members unaware of the tools.
As for faculty, they tend to be really busy, and have varying comfort levels integrating JoVE into the classroom. You need to understand how you can teach with video, how you can work that into the syllabus you’ve had for years.
Tell me about how you are addressing these subscriber pains.
My team is solving the problems of the faculty teachers and researchers working in the class or lab. We’re showing them what relevant videos there are with the right protocols or educational content. And we also work with lab coordinators and student groups.
We have solutions to subscriber problems. Our videos are short and they help visual learners, and have closed captions in 10 languages, which is great for a variety of reasons. We help faculty find the resources they need, and help them reduce the time needed for classroom prep. We also save labs money by reducing the time it takes to reproduce experiments. That’s time-consuming and faculty and researchers can’t look for everything they might need. Locating the right methods in our videos helps improve these outcomes.
What’s your favorite show?
The “Below Deck” series. It’s so not my reality.