Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2016 – MCC: Kathleen Borbee

Kathleen Borbee is an Associate Professor in the Business Administration & Economics Department at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY.

I teach several courses including Marketing, Sales and Applied Business Applications, I’ve been at MCC full time for almost seven years and prior to that I was an Adjunct for four years while I worked for IBM where I had a 30+ year career in Systems Engineering, Marketing and Sales Operations.I like to stress to my students that the 21st century worker is a whole brained individual as discussed in Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. In a era where businesses are replacing people with computers and everything that can be outsourced is, creativity becomes the competitive difference that can open doors for our students. Teaching must be experiential, multimedia and interactive. Learning is more than the acquisition of knowledge – it is unique to each individual.

Toward that end, I believe that online learning can embrace that philosophy through the integration of collaborative technological tools and processes that support learning such as VoiceThread, COIL, Sreencastify, interactive teams, etc. These tools encourage students to discover solutions and resolve problems they may encounter in the learning process. They can also help address the uniqueness of the culture or climate associated with the online community of learners, and help transfer new learning to the real world which is an indication that meaningful learning has taken place.