SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2025: Adirondack – Jessica Best

Dr. Jessica Best is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Adirondack, where she has worked for the past ten years. She began teaching online in 2018, and she learned to love it during the pandemic when she and her students learned how to create community, joy, and a love of learning through online courses. She has taught College Writing I and II, Writing about Literature, the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), Women in Literature, and Graphic Novels online, and she has taught students local to SUNY Adirondack and from around the country.

During the Summer of 2024, Dr. Best engaged in a SUNY Online Course Quality Review (OSCQR) fellowship on the Adirondack campus, and she learned how to make her online courses engaging and accessible for all students using the OSCQR Rubric. She has since revised all of her courses in order to make them adhere to the rubric. It has been Dr. Best’s pedagogical approach to engage students through images, videos, and playful interactions within the online learning environment in order to cultivate life-long learners.