SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2024: Potsdam – Robert Hinckley

Robert Hinckley is a Professor, Interim Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences, and Interim Chair of Psychology at SUNY Potsdam. He earned a BA in international relations from the University of Redlands and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research expertise is in public opinion and political psychology.

Although I’ve taught online courses for nearly a decade, working with my faculty colleagues and Potsdam’s instructional designers to develop the first online political science, B.A. in the SUNY system has been a wonderful challenge. The work of placing an entire curriculum online forced me to examine my assumptions about our students and how to help them deepen their understand of politics and government. Rather than simply translate what I had done in the classroom into an asynchronous format, my colleagues and I worked together to identify tools and content that we could scaffold into an integrated program. For instance, we identified social annotation tools, such as Perusal, that create new forms of interaction with the course materials. We also created new content to engage students, including an academic simulation that gives students the chance to test their understanding of the course material in a novel environment. In the process of creating the building blocks of the simulation, we set the stage for students to learn the basics of the simulated environment in our introductory courses and then grow into a set of increasingly difficult and varied challenges as they move into their upper-division coursework. In short, this has been one of the most demanding and exciting moments for professional growth that I have experienced.