Teaching Beyond the Assignment

Charline Nixon: Teaching the skills behind cybersecurity success

Charline Nixon brings 34 years of information technology and cybersecurity experience to a classroom that, she believes, should reflect real-world practice.

Nixon holds doctoral degrees in cybersecurity and business administration and maintains professional certifications from organizations including EC-Council, CompTIA, Microsoft, and the SANS Institute. She currently serves as an overseas collegiate professor at UMGC while pursuing a master’s degree in forensic investigation and data analytics. Before joining UMGC in 2021, she served as vice president of academics and dean at EC-Council University, where she oversaw curriculum architecture for graduate and undergraduate cybersecurity programs. Earlier, she was a tenured professor at Calhoun Community College in Huntsville, Alabama, where she secured grant funding for cyber training and built IT security certification boot camps.

That experience shapes how she teaches. When Nixon covers a concept, she doesn’t reach for a textbook example—she reaches for her own career. Students in her courses describe a professor who grounds technical concepts in  scenarios they may encounter in the workplace or in service. 

“You matter in this field,” she said she tells learners. “Remember that every cybersecurity challenge you solve helps protect people and trust in our digital world.”

The stakes are tangible for many of the learners she serves. UMGC in Europe serves active-duty servicemembers and military-affiliated learners who may use what they learn in mission-critical environments, where security failures could carry consequences far beyond a failed course assignment.

Nixon is serious about that responsibility. She extends her teaching beyond scheduled hours through science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) initiatives, hands-on technology projects, and network security boot camps designed to help learners build the specific technical competencies required for industry certifications.

Her teaching philosophy can be distilled to a single conviction: learning happens through doing. Through practical projects, simulations, and case studies drawn from professional experience, she helps learners build both knowledge and the confidence to apply it.

Ashley Romain: Teaching the skills behind effective communication

Ashley Romain begins from a different observation: many learners need support with skills that often go unrecognized.

A native of London with a master’s degree in teaching English as a foreign language from the University of Kent at Canterbury, Romain has spent more than two decades at UMGC, first teaching in Japan, and later at military installations across Germany and Italy. Before joining UMGC, he served as an assistant professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, where he also designed a computer-assisted language learning program. He has also trained English-language instructors and served as an examiner for international language proficiency assessments. He has taught more than 4,000 learners at UMGC.

He primarily teaches writing—foundational courses, research writing, technical writing, business writing, speech—and he has developed a central argument that runs through all of it: many learners are not taking full advantage of Microsoft Word’s professional features, and almost none of them realize it.

This is not a complaint about effort or ability. Romain’s point is structural. Learners rely on Microsoft Word or similar programs to produce many of their assignments, but often arrive with limited experience using advanced formatting and document-management features. Learners often rely on familiar habits rather than the tools’ full capabilities, which can limit opportunities to develop professional communication skills. The process of producing a well-formatted submission, he noted, is inseparable from the process of learning to communicate well. 

His response has been systematic. In writing courses, he walks learners step-by-step through video tutorials he designs and produces himself, teaching students to use Word’s built-in styles to structure APA manuscripts from the ground up. Learners prepare mock professional papers, revise them through several rounds until they are correct, then convert them to APA student papers—learning not just how to format a document but the attention to detail that formatting requires, including revision and the recognition that even small details have logic behind them.

“I originally thought APA formatting was simply following a template,” one learner wrote in an assignment comment. “[This class] allowed me to have a different perspective from viewing formatting as ‘it’s just a template’ to recognizing it as a skill.”

That shift—from compliance to competence—is what Romain is after. He shares videos he produces freely with students, including a Mock APA Professional Paper tutorial that has accumulated more than 1,300 views since 2023. He also hosts optional Sunday evening Zoom workshops for writing students and participates in rotating Saturday sessions through UMGC in Europe’s no-cost Writing Doctor program, a team-based initiative open to any writer, not just UMGC students. To date, he has hosted more than 55 such sessions. 

“Stay consistent and remain curious,” Romain tells learners. “Small, steady efforts each day often lead to greater success than occasional or last-minute work.”