How a Digital Media Arts faculty member is prototyping a free, local-first, AI-augmented career dashboard for students to keep after graduation.
Residential faculty in Digital Media Arts at GCC. I started teaching as an adjunct in 1998, joined GCC in 2004 as Director of Instructional Technology, and have been full-time faculty since 2010.
I also spent time in EdTech product management at a startup in the late 1990s. MEd from NAU, 2017, research in connectivism and personal learning environments. That’s the theoretical foundation under everything I’m showing you today.
I had just graduated with a design degree. First day at a Fortune 100 company, a colleague handed me a printout:
“Here’s HTML. Learn it.”
He had a server under his desk and a website already started. I learned HTML in a week and we shipped one of the first Fortune 100 websites on the internet.
Web design wasn’t a thing when I was in college. I learned a tool that didn’t exist when I was a student. In a creative field, that is not a one-time event. It is the normal condition of the work.
Right now my field is changing faster than it ever has, because of AI. So I stopped waiting and jumped in.
Grid, hierarchy, typography, color, composition. These haven’t moved in centuries. Students get this in school.
Figma, Adobe CC, Webflow, generative AI. These will look very different in five years. Probably less.
We don’t know yet. Whatever they are, students will need to learn them in a week. Just like I had to learn HTML.
And Canvas access ends at graduation.
Resume drafts, cover letters, feedback comments, interview recordings, job research, rubric notes, 12 discussions, 8 quizzes.
Canvas access revoked. Threads vanish. Drafts vanish. Feedback vanishes. What students keep: a folder of PDFs.
The Monday morning after commencement.
They have a degree. They have the portfolio. They have the folder of PDFs. What they don’t have:
The structure of their semester, which jobs they liked, which they applied to
Their cover-letter drafts, interview practice notes, mock feedback
The weekly habit of “spend two hours on job search” that the course built in them
Anyone to ask. Their instructor is teaching the next cohort.
I’m a faculty member with a design degree. I built a tool by describing what I wanted.
Writing software by describing intent in plain English to an LLM and iterating on what it produces. You don’t need to write the code, you need to know what you want and how to recognize when the output is right.
“I want to prototype a single-HTML-file dashboard students populate during AVC 248 and keep after graduation. Local-first, no login, first name only. Walk me through the architecture before we write any code.”
“There’s a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI · X post, February 2, 2025
A career launch dashboard prototype, designed for students to build during AVC 248 and take with them after graduation.
The capstone career-launch course for DMA and Animation students at GCC.
16 weeks. Online, asynchronous. Roughly 24 students per cohort.
Students arrive with a degree’s worth of design work and a portfolio in progress. They leave with:
Polished resume and cover letter
Portfolio site or reel, presentation video
12 weeks of interview practice + mock interview
Working LinkedIn profile and network plan
An established 15-week course. The plum column shows Render threaded through work students were already doing.
| Wk | Theme | Interview Practice | Resume | ★ Render | Work This Week |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First Half · Building Your Foundation | |||||
| 1 | Getting Started | IP1 Written | , | Setup account Goals & dream job Tool logins | Tech Login Challenge , Adobe, OBS, Miro, Behance, LinkedIn Discussion: Career Services Overview |
| 2 | Goals & Marketplace | IP2 Written | 1st Draft due | Job Search #1 Target market | Personal Goals & Identity Statement Market research , who are you targeting? |
| 3 | Goals & Marketplace | IP3 Written | Grading | Job Search #2 Company research | Instructor grades 1st Draft Watch: Conducting Research for the Interview |
| 4 | Resume + Cover Letter | IP4 Written | 2nd Draft due | , | Resume 2nd Draft , incorporate feedback Cover Letter , begin |
| 5 | Identity & STAR Method | IP5 Written | Grading | Identity Statement | Instructor grades 2nd Draft Identity Design Brief AI Resume Experiment & Reflection |
| 6 | Identity & Self-Presentation | IP6 Written | 3rd Draft due | Elevator Pitch Business Card | Resume 3rd Draft , design pass Business Card Elevator Pitch draft |
| 7 | Midterm Prep + First Recording | IP7 First OBS | Grading | Leave-Behind | Instructor grades 3rd Draft Leave-Behind Concept Midterm Portfolio Prep Plan |
| 8 | Midterm | IP8 Midterm Presentation | , | , | Midterm In-Process Portfolio Presentation , recorded Portfolio / Reel Plan |
| Second Half · Launching Your Career | |||||
| 9 | Business Practices | IP9 Big Interview | 4th Draft due | Job Search #3 Marketing Plan | Resume 4th Draft , polished Freelancing Resources Cover Letter final |
| 10 | Business Practices | IP10 OBS | Grading | Freelance Plan Contract template | Instructor grades 4th Draft Project Brief with Contract Spec Sheet |
| 11 | Networking & LinkedIn | IP11 OBS | , | LinkedIn profile link Mentor contact | Learning LinkedIn for Students Finding a Mentor , outreach Portfolio Check-In |
| 12 | Networking & LinkedIn | IP12 OBS | , | Job Search #4 | Updated LinkedIn Profile 20 Questions for End of Interview |
| 13 | Full Mock Interview | Mock + Big Interview | , | Interview prep notes Job search schedule | Mock Job Interview , self-directed Big Interview platform |
| 14 | Copyright + Final Package begins | , | , | , | Copyright for Digital Media Artists , librarian module Final Resume / Identity / Leave-Behind begin |
| 15 | Final Package due | Final Portfolio Presentation | , | Final Resume Final Cover Letter Final Portfolio Final LinkedIn ★ Complete · submitted | Final Resume, Identity, Leave-Behind , submit Updated Portfolio & LinkedIn Final Portfolio Presentation |
The course already worked. Render doesn’t replace it , it threads through it, so the week-by-week work students do in Canvas lands somewhere they keep. In Week 15 the column goes dark, but the launchpad goes home with them.
Vanilla JavaScript. No framework, no server. The whole app is one file students can save and run anywhere.
All data persists on the student’s machine. Autosaves continuously. No account, no cloud, no third party sees their work.
One click downloads everything. Their backup. Their property. They can move it to any computer, any time.
Live AI features call Anthropic’s Sonnet directly. Student adds their own API key. Optional.
Without an API key, every AI button copies the engineered prompt. Paste into Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini. Their choice.
Built so no PII is transmitted. A proposed Career Services pipeline would send anonymous employer data only.
Two paths through the same tool. Different time, different goals, different output.
Brand design, looking for a studio job
Search 8 hrs · Learn 5 hrs · Portfolio 6 hrs · Network 2 hrs
Animation and character design, scaling freelance
Client work 10 hrs · Learn 6 hrs · Marketing 5 hrs · Search 4 hrs
Switching to the browser now , I’ll walk you through Render as Maya, then as Riley.
A faculty member with a design degree prototyped this in a semester.
I wrote the product requirements document before any code. Claude helped me think it through. The PRD kept the project from sprawling.
Vanilla JS, no framework. Claude wrote most of the code. I read every line, tested every feature, redesigned every panel. Faculty stays in the loop.
Two-month build. I write the spec in plain English, Claude proposes code, I iterate. The same workflow my students are about to learn for their jobs.
My stack: Claude on Anthropic’s $100/month Pro subscription · VS Code · GitHub Pages
An empty AI chat asks the student to already know what to ask. That blank page is where a lot of students freeze, or avoid AI altogether.
A structured tool makes the first move for them. It asks the question, holds their goals and their saved work as context, and turns AI from something intimidating into something they just use.
The interface is the difference between a student using AI with confidence and a student avoiding it.
And building one is not a coding skill. It is prompting. If you can describe what you want, you can do this.
Think of one thing you paste into an AI chat over and over. The same prompt, every week.
That repetition is the signal. That is a structured tool waiting to be built, in your discipline, for your students, or just for you.
Take a minute. Drop one in the chat. What’s yours?
A bilingual student-support router. A student describes a problem in plain English or Spanish, and it points them to the right campus service with contact info, hours, and what to ask for.
Faculty submit a syllabus through a form. An agent checks it against a required-elements rubric, then logs it as complete or emails back a report with specific fixes.
Point it at a Canvas course export and it checks module-to-competency alignment, accessibility, and how assignment due dates fall across the week.
Before any code, I wrote a product requirements document , the same kind a real product team would.
A PRD forces the decisions that matter before they’re expensive: who the users are, what the tool must do, what it deliberately won’t do. For a faculty member building with AI, it’s the difference between a focused tool and an endless pile of features. I write the spec, Claude proposes the code, and the PRD is the thing we both check against.
The full PRD is linked from the portfolio page , useful if you want to build something like this yourself.
Render is a prototype. The point of the next year is to find out what actually works.
A small group of students works through Render so I can see where it helps and where it gets in the way, then revise before it reaches a full class.
One full section of AVC 248 uses Render across the whole semester. If it works well, the natural next step is adapting it for other programs at GCC.
Reach me: michelle.blomberg@gccaz.edu
Everything’s here: singletrackmom.github.io
Render and these slides are both linked from the main page.
Michelle Blomberg · Residential Faculty, Digital Media Arts · Glendale Community College