SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2023: Buffalo – Stuart Inglis

Dr. Stuart Inglis is an instructor in the Pathology and Anatomical Sciences (PAS) department at the University at Buffalo. A native of Canada, Dr. Inglis first moved to the United States in 2001 to begin his doctorate studies in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Ohio University.  He currently serves as the director for the skin/musculoskeletal course for the Jacobs School, as well as for gross anatomy classes taught to dental, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and senior undergraduate students.  Dr. Inglis has also been recently appointed as the director of the Gross Anatomy Laboratories at the University as well as of the Anatomical Gift Program.

Having moved away from scientific bench research, Dr. Inglis is presently focused on teaching pedagogy.  He has developed a flipped classroom approach to many of his classes that utilizes a novel active learning component for the in-class sessions, based on a “think-pair-share” approach to classroom teaching.  Dr. Inglis is also a proponent of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Source materials for the purpose of freely delivering educational content beyond the walls of the university.  Dr. Inglis is the recipient of a Siegel Award for excellence in teaching at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

My introduction to online teaching came by accident, when a brief video I posted to YouTube for a small set of students unwittingly went viral, having racked up 140 thousand views to date. This demonstrated to me the impact that the internet can have on educational outreach and inspired me to develop a full set of lecture videos using open access sources to reach a broader audience than just those enrolled in my classes. I firmly believe that education should be freely accessible to anyone with a desire to learn and take great pride in knowing that these resources I’ve developed have benefited a community of individuals I will never even meet.  Making well-developed educational content that is easy to access is an important tool in combating the volume of misinformation in today’s social media.  The more educated that an individual becomes, the less susceptible they are to unfounded claims and the misrepresentation of facts.