Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2020: Stony Brook – M. Ete Chan

M. Ete Chan, Ph.D. is a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Stony Brook University.  She is passionate in biomedical research and education of students.  To overcome challenges of teaching engineering courses online, she has not only adopted but also created various innovative instructional technology and open educational resources (OER).  Since Summer 2016, she has pioneered online teaching in her BME department with the support of Summer Online Teaching Initiative and Stony Brook Online Learning Development (S-BOLD) Initiative offered by her College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) and the Provost Office, respectively.  In addition to developing online courses including “BME100: Introduction to Biomedical Engineering” and “BME304: Genetic Engineering” for BME students, she has expanded her efforts to create a Master Course Model for an online course “Clinical Challenges of the 21st Century”, which is a High Demand/Controlled Access (HD/CA) course offered to all students on campus to improve their life-long learning skills.  The advantage of a Master Course Model is to allow different instructors to easily adopt and modify the course as needed.  As a result of that, this course has now been offered in the summer and winter sessions as well.  Furthermore, to reduce student’s financial burden from textbooks, Dr. Chan has also developed open educational resources (OER) with the support of SUNY-funded OER Initiative Grant.  

Notably, engineering education involves a lot of teamwork and hands-on work.  To fulfill these learning objectives, Dr. Chan worked closely with her Computer Science collaborator, Richard Mckenna, and the Teaching Learning Lab (TLL) director, Paul St. Denis, in the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) to develop and continuously improve various innovative instructional technology such as lab video games and lab simulation builder for lab learning and interactive video quiz (IVQ) for engaging video lecture and collaborative group presentation.  CELT’s Teaching and Learning Enhancements with New Technology (TALENT) grant and SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant (IITG) encourage instructors to invest their time, talent and energy to solve current and future challenges of pedagogy.  As a 2016 TALENT award and 2016&2018 IITG recipient, Dr. Chan’s team developed not only hands-on educational video lab games to allow her students familiarize themselves with the biotechnology labs in her Genetic Engineering course, but also a lab simulation builder to allow other instructors to create, without any computer programming requirement, a variety of hands-on lab video games.  Even with traditional pre-laboratory assignment, it is difficult to fully prepare our students for the labs.  Not only are there many steps involved for the lab, but there are many safety procedures and little tricks in the experiments that students need to learn in order to perform the experiment successfully.  Class time, lab supplies and instructor/teaching assistant-to- student ratio are limited, and students are often nervous when they are asked to perform hands-on work without any practice before, especially within the constraint of class time.   The success of this project allows students to prepare themselves in a stress-free environment via playing a video game that simulate what they have to do in the actual lab.