Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2020: Nassau – Robert Genter

Robert Genter, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of History, Political Science, Geography, and Latin American Studies where he teaches courses in American and global history. He received a M.A. in modern European history and a Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. Robert is, by training, an intellectual and cultural historian with research interests in modernism and the arts, the history of the Cold War, American popular culture, and the history of the social and behavioral sciences. He recently published his first book, which explores the rise and fall of modernism in American thought and culture in the 1950s, and is currently working on a new manuscript that examines the role of confession in American society and politics in the early Cold War. Robert has been teaching online courses at Nassau Community College since 2013.

I am honored to be part of the growing online education community within SUNY and to have the opportunity to help expand the course offerings and learning opportunities for our diverse student population. Online education is a powerful resource to help many of our students who struggle with attending on-campus courses because of work and family commitments. We have a duty as educators to make higher education as accessible as possible, and online education is a wonderful vehicle to do so. I strive in my courses to provide a diverse learning experience that offers opportunities for meaningful student interaction and active engagement and that challenges students to think critically about the course content. I enjoy experimenting with all of the new online instructional materials and resources that have been developed and adapting them to the learning objectives of my courses. I very much enjoy the flexibility in terms of pedagogy offered by online courses, and my students have responded quite positively to this flexibility as well. I am excited about what the future holds for distance education. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge and thank the Office of Distance Education at NCC, which does a wonderful job introducing instructors to new online tools, strategies, and methods and assisting with any and all problems that we encounter. I deeply appreciate everything that they do for me and for my students.