Kim Rocco Shields is founder and CEO of Genius Produced, a Los Angeles-based education technology company that applies cinematic storytelling techniques to online learning. Drawing on a background in Hollywood, she built the company around the idea that traditional online courses — built on static lectures and slide decks — fail to engage learners, and developed a proprietary approach she calls "Visual Instructional Design," which uses filmmaking methods to create narrative-driven lessons meant to improve engagement and retention.
She has put that approach into practice through partnerships with universities, most notably working with USC's Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and education company 2U to build the Virtual Field eXperience, a ten-week simulation-based program for social work students that mixes live actor interactions with self-paced online learning. Early results from the program suggested students performed on par with, or better than, peers trained through more traditional methods.
Shields has argued that educational content should be just as engaging as entertainment, and is now working to extend her approach beyond university programs into consumer-facing courses, including one focused on the role media plays in driving social change.
