Open SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador 2016 – SUNY Poly: Naren Peddibhotla

Naren Peddibhotla is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems in the Department of Business Management at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute at Utica, New York.

I received a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (Kolkata, India), and a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Mumbai, India). I have worked in industry for nine years in positions in the fields of sales, marketing and information systems.

I have been teaching online graduate courses each semester since 2007 when I joined the SUNY Institute of Technology (now SUNY Polytechnic Institute). Courses that I have taught to MBA and MS (Accountancy) students using ANGEL and later BlackBoard include 1) Management Information Systems, 2) E-commerce and Entrepreneurship, 3) Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and 4) New Product Design and Development.

Before I began teaching fully online courses, my experience with teaching using an online system involved developing my own course website and later using WebCT for course support (e.g., delivery of course material, display of grades and submission of assignments). However, teaching online was and still is a challenging experience for me. Beginning with an attempt to simply replicate classroom teaching online, I have tried to evolve my teaching in various ways to achieve better student learning outcomes each semester.

A significant source for ideas for changes in my online teaching has been feedback from faculty colleagues who teach fully online courses and also from my students. Second, workshops organized by the SUNY Learning Network (SLN) and later OPEN SUNY have also exposed me to various approaches to course design. Starting from the workshop on ANGEL basics in my first semester through training on Quality Matters and recent workshops on Instructional Design Competency, I have been fortunate to learn about various perspectives on online teaching. Third, the annual Conference on Instruction and Technology has been another venue for drawing upon the experiences of other online faculty.

Over the years, I have also been measuring changes in student performance based on implementation of new approaches to teaching using the case study method in my classes. Results from a seven-year study of practices that work in teaching case studies online will be published in a paper forthcoming in the Online Learning Journal. I plan to conduct further research focused on improving student performance by drawing upon cognitive science. This will be part of my ongoing research in knowledge transfer in online contexts.

Further details about my professional background and research are available at my LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pnaren) and my Google Scholar page (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=DOO67IgAAAAJ). My page on the OPEN SUNY COTE community is at http://cotecommunity.open.suny.edu/profile/NarenPeddibhotla I welcome your thoughts or comments regarding online teaching at my email address: peddibn (at) sunyit (dot) edu