SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2022: New Paltz – Caroline Hopenwasser

Caroline Hopenwasser, Ph.D. teaches at SUNY New Paltz in the School of Education, where she is the Coordinator for Graduate Programs in Literacy. This program trains teachers to be literacy specialists and literacy leaders in their schools and communities and has been developed and accredited in both hybrid and online formats. Currently, Caroline serves SUNY New Paltz as a Peer Instructional Design Mentor Teacher for Online and Hybrid Learning.

I became interested in hybrid and flipped instruction in 2018. Until that point, I taught in person only. After teaching my first fully flipped and hybrid class, I was hooked. At that point, I worked with my colleagues to turn our entire graduate program into a hybrid format to better serve our students, most of whom are working teachers. Little did we know how well this would situate us to pivot to entirely online learning when the pandemic hit. Our transfer to completely online teaching was so popular with our students that we had our program certified by the state as an online program. Now we have both in person and entirely online options for students to choose from. This is a perfect example of how a combination of teaching modalities can be used to serve students in new and creative ways.