Faculty Success Stories

Faculty Success Stories

Faculty Success Stories profile faculty members who are engaged in innovative teaching practices in face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses. Each story follows the same template in showcasing faculty work, and addresses the role of academic technology, learning goals, student and instructor perspectives, and assessment. Each story also contains a sample of the teaching practice in action – via video, screenshots, photographs, or other means.

For more information on Faculty Success Stories, contact Martin Springborg.

Matt Boudinot, Automotive Instructor

What are you trying to accomplish through the use of the 360 degree camera and other tools like Kahoot and Flipgrid?

Good question. Student engagement is one of the big ones. Trying to get the students to be more engaged in whatever topic is being covered and then trying to get them to have a better understanding of it.

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Lisa DuRose, English Instructor

Lisa DuRose

I am currently one of the co-directors for the learning community program at IHCC. Learning communities allow students to take a combination of courses, usually around one theme. A typical learning community might combine a reading or writing course with another discipline class, such as history, psychology, sociology, or communications…..

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Brett Kolles, English Instructor

Brett Kolles

It’s often said that misery is the mother of invention, and quite candidly, I was never satisfied with the Heavy Duty Truck Technology technical writing textbook that we used, nor was I keen on any of the other like textbooks available. I wanted to create a technical writing textbook that would blend well the academic with the practical. After interviewing many HDTT leaders in the field and online research, I was able to put together a textbook that would satisfy our enrolled program students and their future employers.

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Patrice Nadeau, Medical Assistant Instructor

Patrice NadeauAt the time (2010-2012), we were trying to boost enrollment – so we were trying to capture students who wouldn’t be able to participate in our program on a Monday-Thursday schedule. People like stay-at-home moms for whom trying to afford daycare and come to school was too much, or someone who couldn’t give up their daytime job in order to come to a daytime program, or distance learners who could only come to campus one day a week.

The goal for this project was to reduce the hands-on laboratory time by half. We delivered some of the lab prep online to see if students could come to campus and complete the lab in half the time (compared to traditional courses). Instead of having a guided practice lab, where instructors demonstrate and give students time to practice, and students read the materials or looked at the films and came to campus ready to go and do it. That’s exactly what we have our hybrid/online students doing every week. This reduces our visual – or need to be with them on campus – to one, two-hour session a week for each course. For scheduling, we picked Tuesdays because it’s the day of the week least likely to be have a holiday, campus event, or release day – because we couldn’t afford to lose a lab night.

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Nicole Nieman, Vet Tech Program Director

Nicole NiemanThere were a couple of classes that we decided that we were going to pre-record lectures for, so that the students would have a library of content that they would be able to have and to save or to use for resources and to reference. When they would get to the end of the program, they need to go back and review content for say, the imaging class (which is extremely technical). They could pull those recorded lectures back out, and they could listen to those recorded lectures and reread through that material and be able to bring it back up for study purposes.

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Nicholas Nownes, English Instructor

Nicholas NownesDescribe what you are trying to accomplish with the specific project or teaching practice featured here. How does this project or practice influence student learning?

Well, what I wanted to do was not have students spend $180 on a textbook we use maybe 50% of. I just was not happy with the texts that were out there. Honestly that’s what motivated this initially. The texts could have done the job; publishers just wanted $150 for material that felt to me like it could have been used in a PhD program in professional writing. It seemed extravagant. It seems silly, and it seemed like a big ask for students to do that sort of thing. That’s what initiated this.

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Kathy Paukert, Medical Assistant Program Director

Describe what you are trying to accomplish with the specific project or teaching practice featured here.

To make my grading clearer – so students understand exactly how I’m grading and then come in and look at next steps. So if they get a certain grade and it’s not a passing grade then what do they do next.

This semester (fall, 2020) is just unique anyway. I am more mindful about putting more information into the section of Medical Documentation. Other semesters, students meet with me for two hours a week. Obviously this semester that didn’t happen but there were still fewer questions from students, like “What do you want on this?” “What is that supposed to look like?” “Where do I find this?” This semester, given the semester that it is, there are still fewer questions on how to navigate through an assignment.

Christine Petrich, Health and Physical Education Instructor

I created an open educational resource for HLTH 1154, a new course that I was developing and teaching for the first time in fall 2020. It was perfect timing in that I didn’t have a preset notion of what the class would look like, how it would be delivered, or what materials would be used. This allowed me to think openly about the entire course design and development process.

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Mary Petrie, English Instructor

Mary Petrie

IHCC English faculty member Mary Petrie talks with Randi Goettl and Martin Springborg about her application of Universal Design for Learning principles.

WATCH UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING INTERVIEW    

 

Scott Sandok, Economics Instructor

Scott Sandok

My goal is to create an online course that is as engaging and supportive as my face to face classes. My goal is for student’s efforts to be on the subject, not the navigation tool. That said, I try to leverage the tool to provide as much of “baseline” feedback as possible so that students get instant validation or information to help guide them along their learning process….

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Carie Statz, Marketing and Sales Instructor

I feel the most important part of my job is to make sure that the students are job ready by the time they graduate. So to me, each of the courses has to have what I would say as a simulated real-world environment project. And some of these students that I serve already have their own businesses or they’re already working in marketing, but do not have an educational background that have taught them the strategies for how to do marketing and sales.

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Amy Zsohar, Communications Instructor

All of my classes are built around themes, topics that are timely and that are tough to talk about. Like food and housing insecurity, gender-based violence, anti-racism, and environmental justice – and more environmental equity. They’re all kind of couched in these big themes and what I love about these big themes is they are themes that hit every single person. So when the student walks in the door we’re already starting on a level playing field with a topic. Some may know more, and some may know less but we’re all kind of in that space of how are we going to do this.

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