SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2024: Adirondack – Amy Macaluso

Dr. Amy Macaluso began teaching as an adjunct instructor of biology at SUNY Adirondack in 2017 and is a recipient of the 2021-2022 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching. She earned her BA in Biology from the College of Saint Rose and her PhD from Temple University where her research focused on the effects of ultraviolet radiation on components of freshwater food webs.

Like many others she was introduced to the OSCQR rubric and process for developing quality online courses in 2020 during the pandemic. Using the best practices and tools of OSCQR she developed the first fully online biology laboratory course taught at SUNY Adirondack using Blackboard LMS. As the instructor to pilot the Brightspace LMS for her campus, she was the first to use the new system to teach courses online in the Summer of 2022. She then led workshops and hosted office hours that fall through the SUNY Adirondack Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TLC) to assist fellow faculty with Brightspace related topics and helped them prepare their courses during the LMS transition.

Now as Assistant Professor of Biology at SUNY Adirondack she teaches biology courses in both traditional face-to-face and online modalities. She strives to design her courses to meet the needs of all learners, providing multiple ways for students to interact with course material from basic slides, images and documents to dynamic web pages, audio files, videos, live-streams, discussions and virtual laboratory exercises. Amy is her campus’s Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology (FACT²) faculty representative and the Science Division TLC workgroup member where she assists with professional development programming for faculty by faculty. She continues to hone her skills on topics such as accessibility, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and inclusivity. She recently earned the OSCQR Reviewer Badge from SUNY Online and is working towards her full OSCQR Reviewer Certification.