Everyone fails; it’s a fact of life. But, in hindsight, sometimes you realize that failing is the best thing that could have happened to you. Here are two stories like that from my professional life.

Story 1: Failing to Get the Job

I began applying for jobs in my final year as a doctoral student. My dissertation research had centered on learning objects, or “any digital resource that can be reused to support learning” (Wiley, 2000). There was a tremendous amount of interest in learning objects at the time, with everyone from Cisco to the Department of Defense creating frameworks for designing digital resources for maximum reusability across learning contexts. I interviewed with an exciting educational technology startup in San Francisco, but after a post-interview drive around the area, I realized there was no way that I or my family would be happy there. I then applied for a faculty position at Utah State University in the Department of Instructional Technology, but came in second place in that search. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next.

Not long after my job talk at USU, I received a call from Mimi Recker, a faculty member there who shared my interests in learning objects. She proposed that we write a grant proposal for NSF together and build funding for a postdoctoral fellowship into the grant. A few months later—honestly, I think I had forgotten we had even applied for the grant—I learned that we had been awarded the funding. 

We moved to Logan, UT (a far better fit for us than the Bay Area), and I began working as a postdoctoral fellow. After the frustration of having placed second in the faculty search, the postdoctoral fellowship turned out to be a blessing beyond what I could have imagined. Rather than preparing to teach classes, I immediately jumped into full-time work extending my dissertation research. Our team published papers and presented at conferences, and I began thinking about how I would extend the research we were doing once I finally found a faculty appointment. Ideas were coming fast and furious, and I was blogging about them, getting feedback from the nascent community of edtech bloggers, and I felt like I was breaking some new ground.

The following year there was another faculty opening in the IT department at USU, and I was successful in getting the job this time. I switched from being a postdoctoral fellow on the grant to being a Co-PI on the grant. My very first semester as a faculty member I was already part of a grant that allowed us to hire graduate students, allowed me to buy out part of my teaching load, and let me continue building the great momentum I had going with my research agenda. 

If I had gotten that first faculty job when I applied for it, my research agenda might not have ever become as well established. I’ve thought many times that failing in my first job search and ending up in the postdoc position was the single best thing that ever happened for my career. 

Story 2: Failing to Get the Grant

Instructional design was, in the late 1990s, tilting heavily in the direction of automation. David Merrill was hosting a summer institute at USU each year that was focused on automating instructional design. There was a lot of time, money, and effort being spent by corporations, the military, and academics trying to automate the selection and assembly of learning objects. What really bothered me was the way people were being left out of this brave new world of automated instruction. Some in the field even began talking about teachers as being 1) the most expensive part of education and 2) the most highly variable with regard to quality. “What if we just replaced human teachers with intelligent tutors that helped people work through a set of learning objects that had been automatically chosen and sequenced for each individual learner,” they asked. “We could cut out most of the cost and insure more consistent quality!” Now, I’m a fan of technology. But proposals like this were going way too far, in my opinion. I have always believed that the human, relational element of education is critical; so, I started blogging essays and writing articles that were critical of the direction things were going.

During that first year as a faculty member, I had the opportunity to compete for grant funding through a College of Education internal competition. I took the idea I was most excited about—the need to not only keep humans in the loop, but to keep them in the center of everything—and wrote what I believed was a really great proposal for the internal competition. The budget request was a whopping $35,000. I got the grant proposal submitted within hours of the deadline (which is a bad habit I still have to this day) and started waiting.

The proposal was enthusiastically rejected by the college reviewers. I received back a printed copy covered in more red ink than I had ever seen before—more even than my early dissertation drafts had gotten from my advisor. It seemed like everything about the proposal was wrongheaded from the reviewers’ perspectives.

This was, needless to say, initially a huge blow to my junior faculty ego. I was sure I was onto something really important. My critique of where the research on learning objects was going wasn’t just empty complaining. I was laying out a better alternative—a way of approaching online learning that blended the best parts of reusable digital resources with lessons we were learning about how technology can mediate social learning.

In the end, I decided the college reviewers either failed to understand my proposal, were shortsighted in their consideration of my proposal, or were simply wrong in their decision to reject it for some other reason. I kept looking for an opportunity to fund the idea and found an NSF solicitation where it could fit. I expanded on the ideas in my original proposal, given the bigger budget possibilities and longer page length of the NSF proposal format, and submitted the proposal. That resulted in my receiving a CAREER grant—“the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” The grant provided over $560,000 over a five-year period, and was the anchor grant that helped secure approval for the creation of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at USU.

Lessons Learned

I was really excited about the possibilities of getting my first faculty job and getting a grant for my new idea. Both of these desires seemed appropriate, worthwhile, and exactly in line with where I hoped my professional career would go. I felt really positive about both of these goals at the time; I thought I had a great chance at both the faculty job and getting my grant funded. But that’s not the way either of those things went. Both failures filled me with disappointment, frustration, and even a little disillusionment—temporarily. But, over time, these experiences and many others like them have taught me the truth of that old line from The Sound of Music: “when the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.” In hindsight, I can see that those windows have led to far better places than the doors I was trying to push my way through.