The annual Ecampus Awards honor outstanding faculty partners who go the extra mile to develop meaningful and innovative online learning environments for Oregon State’s distance students.
Oregon State Ecampus is home to national award-winning multimedia developers and videographers who partner with OSU faculty to create custom media to be used in Oregon State’s online courses, including videos, animations, virtual field trips, augmented reality, 3D scanning and virtual reality.
“I love finding practical ways to make students’ goals a reality.” Ecampus anthropology advisor and instructor Brenda Kellar has been a leader in the anthropology program since Oregon State first began offering the degree online, but as a three-time OSU alumna, her roots go even deeper.
Without a physical campus location to visit, Oregon State’s online learners needed a clear-cut path to important mental health resources, so Ecampus faculty and staff partnered with Counseling and Psychological Services and the Student Care Team to lay the foundation.
In all aspects of life, communication is key. Take a look behind the scenes of speech communication associate professor Colin Hesse’s online classrooms, where Oregon State students across all majors gain the skills that are needed to effectively communicate in both face-to-face and digital settings.
Whether presenting at a conference, developing an open education resource, coordinating an environmental summer camp for youth, or instructing Oregon State students online and on campus, Dave Stemper’s deep-rooted environmental scholarship has been passed on widely to help shape a thoughtful new generation of natural resource managers and communicators.
When Demian Hommel applied for the Oregon State University Ecampus Research Fellows Program, he carried the seed of an idea: Experiential education can transform a student’s understanding of a concept into real-world circumstances, so it should be offered equally to learners in online and traditional classroom settings. What he didn’t know was that sowing the seed of this idea through his research project could help sprout a grassroots community of advocates like him.
“It isn’t just that a student can participate in the hybrid program without leaving Portland. They can deepen their education by being right in the middle of the city and exploring Portland from a new vantage point while also being a member of the OSU community.” Instructor, blogger, author, self-described gero-punk and long-time Portlander Jenny Sasser is set to explore the human experience at the university’s new location near Pioneer Square through a mixture of classroom and online instruction.
Teaching immediately-applicable skills and guiding students on their multilingual journeys? Now you’re speaking Raven Chakerian’s language. Raven is an online instructor of Spanish and Italian at Oregon State University who realized her passion for languages and communication early on. Even outside of her formal education in Spanish, she pursued language learning through travel, community development, and social interactions. When she joined Oregon State Ecampus five years ago, teaching online was like learning a new language – conquering its challenges and new possibilities, she’s working toward fluency.
An education with Oregon State Ecampus can take students places they never expected. And that’s not only because a top-ranked degree opens up new pathways for their futures. Ecampus students often find themselves visiting unfamiliar places to complete their course work through field trips.
