SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2021: Fredonia – Lisa Walters

Lisa M. Walters, PhD, MBA, MT(ASCP)SBB, CQA, LSSBB is Associate Professor of Operations Management at the State University of New York at Fredonia.  She began her career as an adjunct professor at Fredonia in fall of 2001, teaching human resource management, business communications, organizational behavior, and strategic management. Prior to her full-time appointment at Fredonia in 2013, she served as the Senior Compliance Analyst for the American Red Cross Biomedical Services group, where she analyzed and evaluated operational data for executive and governmental reporting, as well as provide insight into operational quality assessments. She additionally served as a Senior Quality Auditor with the Red Cross, evaluating biomedical operations for compliance and quality. Lastly, she served as the Principal Officer of her entrepreneurial consulting company Healthy Solutions Quality Consulting. At Fredonia, she teaches Operations Management and Applied Quality Operations, as well as various special topics, such as Project Management, Analytical Foundations, Quality Standards and Audit, and Supply Chain Management.  

Online learning is critical to meeting the challenges faced by institutes of higher learning, allowing educators to reach beyond the traditional population of learners to those individuals who seek to engage in further education, no matter their location.  In this way, it is an inclusive endeavor, bringing knowledge to the digital “doorstep” to a diverse array of people.  In this age of the pandemic, we all are seasoned digital educators; we were headed there anyway, but COVID was the catalyst that forced us to go faster; our challenge is to now go further.  We all must endeavor to embrace the wonderful digital tools that are available to us, which we can use not only in our online teaching, but even adapted to our traditional classrooms.  These applications and ideas release a completely new level of creativity within our academic selves, injecting our curricula with new ideas, bringing renewed energy to our teaching habits.  We must approach online learning as academics, with curiosity and experimentation, and model these behaviors to our students. The reward is worth the effort, for all stakeholders involved.