As an educator, I aim to help students develop essential life skills such as collaboration, communication, technological fluency, proficiency with digital tools, global awareness, and ethics. The courses I have taught throughout my career as an educator and curriculum designer reflect my interdisciplinary background. My teaching experience focuses on technical communication, writing with AI, rhetoric, language, localization, and user experience. At two different Early Colleges in El Paso, TX, I taught English, Spanish, Practical Writing, Accounting, Journalism, Digital Interactive Media, and Business Information Management. I also taught business and marketing courses at the University of Phoenix. At New Mexico State University, I taught Professional and Technical Communication courses online. Most recently, I imparted courses on rhetoric and technical writing at Chapman University in California. At Chapman, I also worked with graduate student instructors to design curricula that incorporated writing with AI in first-year composition courses. I currently teach user experience (UX) courses at Texas Tech University.
Texas Tech University
User Experience Design (undergraduate course)
Students in this course undertake a user experience (UX) design project to research, define, design, and evaluate a digital technology that affords interactions that people find meaningful and, in some way, valuable. Throughout the UX design process, students develop a design concept, create a digital prototype, and reflect on its development by reading and discussing assigned texts, sketching design ideas, and examining use case scenarios.
User Experience Research (graduate course)
Students in this course are introduced to foundational principles and theories of user experience (UX) research. The course prepares students to perform basic usability testing of user-facing documents. Students explore and practice user research, usability testing, human-centered design, and digital prototyping.
Chapman University
Technical Writing (undergraduate course)
This course explored principles and procedures of technical writing with attention to rhetorical strategies, document design, usability, style, and editing. These principles and procedures were applied to the basic genres of research-based scientific and technical writing, including the report, proposal, manual, resume and/or professional correspondence for business, industry, and technology.
Teaching Composition (graduate course)
Students practiced various techniques for helping student writers compose rhetorically persuasive discourse, refine diagnostic and editing skills, design whole courses and individual programs for improvement and enhancement, and validate students’ progress. Students visited composition classes and/or observed writing tutoring sessions overseen by experienced writing center tutors.
Nora K Rivera, Ph.D. 