Consider reading this narrative in the order in which it was composed, starting with Post #1.
Those who put it all together, who worked directly on student learning ... the faculty. I felt so fortunate to work with so many dedicated colleagues. From the first day that I began teaching in 1994 at South Seattle Community College, I knew that I had found the community that I most wanted to be part of. The number of faculty colleagues whom I later worked with while overseeing the e-learning operation at North Seattle Community College totaled in the many hundreds, and it was a pleasure to collaborate (or just "tag along") with each of them on strategies, techniques and technologies that would help students as they learned.
I can't begin to name them all here but many will appear in future posts detailing our college's e-learning history. For now, I will just mention a few "seasoned faculty" whose love of teaching and learning influenced me deeply along the way. I have left out many other very special friends and devoted colleagues for now, but will come back to them soon.
Art Woodbury, a former bassoonist in many orchestras (including the Harry James Orchestra), as well as a former university professor, lent his extensive background and talents (after "retirement") toward developing two richly designed online music classes at North Seattle College. Together with his wife, Sharon Woodbury, who provided technical and logistical support, Art not only built online course websites of hundreds of pages with many musical clips from his own recordings, but also taught these classes in vigorous fashion with weekly essay work and extensive feedback to his students, receiving the accolades of many of them for his thoughtful approach to their success. Art and Sharon were always pushing forward with their focus on how to make learning both meaningful and fun for every student.
Pat Bouker was another inspirational educator who jumped into developing online accounting classes as a way to reach more students with busy lives. Pat created sequences of course websites from a common template so that students could focus easily on the learning while taking sequences of classes containing familiar course layouts. Whenever a new adjunct or full-time instructor joined the department, Pat brought her or him to our center and asked us to provide copies of his course websites to help the new faculty member get up and running. He then helped ensure that the faculty member felt supported toward confidently using the technology. Pat also developed "flex" classes in which students had the option to attend lectures online or in person throughout the quarter depending on their personal schedules. I admired the generous willingness that Pat showed in sharing his personal work freely as a means toward building the accounting department's reputation for student support.
Val Donato was an inspirational instructor, developing an amazing online class in early childhood education that was rich in resources for parents, teachers, au pairs and others. She was one of the first faculty members with whom I worked on online course development and implementation, and her enthusiasm and dedication were invigorating to an uneasy new distance learning coordinator! Val and her co-instructors (Betsy Bird and then Sandra Looper) were tireless in building extensive new course materials in their "special topics" class such that each quarter it offered additional learning benefits, and students could rejoin the class anew each quarter for years. Val brought in International class participants who signed up online from around the world, more than any other online class at the college. Val tragically died from an illness in 2013. For her tireless work and much-praised service to the early childhood education community of parents, teachers, families and colleagues, a special fund was created such that a stipend in her name is awarded annually to support an educator's professional development toward improving the Parent Education Program.
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