Faculty Mentors

As part of the certificate program, a select group of faculty from all colleges will participate as faculty mentors. These faculty, with experience with online/hybrid courses, will complete online faculty mentor training in preparation to facilitate a cohort.

College of Business

• Jennifer "Kat" Bechkoff

  • Associate Professor, Marketing and Business Analytics Department

    - She has been teaching at San Jose State University for twelve years, ten of which have been via asynchronous online instruction.

    - Apart from San Jose State University, she has taught a distance learning course for the University of Cincinnati in the mid-2000s and currently adjuncts an online class for Palo Alto University.

    - She likes exploring new ways to streamline the online learning experience and make online teaching efficient and effective.

    -Her current research area is academic integrity and she is passionate about students graduating with a quality education.

• Allyson Gomez

  • Lecturer (and Alum!), Lucas College of Business in the School of Management

    - She started teaching at San Jose State University in 2017 (Bus3 150 and Bus3 160).

    - She has spent over 10 years in online training in the corporate space leading webinars, leadership training, and orientations for global audiences of up to 300+ people.

    - She’s very excited to dialogue, mentor, and learn more as we ramp up to a fully virtual fall!!

• Colin Onita

  • Assistant Professor, Lucas College of Business in Accounting and Finance Department

    - He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Memphis and has taught accounting and information systems at the University of Akron.

    - He has been teaching courses of accounting information systems, data modeling, and analytics and has experienced extensive teaching experience of twelve years.

    - He is well versed in teaching hybrid courses at the master’s level and is more inclined towards exploring the teacher-student interaction over the internet.

    - For the next fall semester, he will be teaching online master's classes and is looking forward to mentor his colleagues and students.

• Richard Sessions

  • Lecturer, Info Systems and Technology

    - He is an entrepreneur, enterprise executive, and a consultant in academics, who has fifteen years of teaching experience.

    - He has been teaching online since last spring and well versed in the transition to online teaching.

    - He aims at improving the current obstacle of online teaching and explores ways of face to face interaction with students.

College of Health and Human Sciences

• Alice Butzlaff

  • Assistant Professor, School of Nursing

    - She has been teaching for about fifteen years and has spent thirty years as a nurse and twenty-five years as a family nurse practitioner.

    - She has a broad experience of teaching at hospitals, live streams, and online. 

    - She is interested in strategies to become better organized that will make it easier for online learning to take place.

• Megan Chang

  • Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy

    - She has been teaching for the occupational therapy department for eight years.

    - She is a QM certified professor, who is well versed in online teaching.

    - She has taught online for distance semester programs in the past.

    - She is interested in learning new ways to create videos effectively.

• Denise Dawkins

  • Assistant Professor, School of Nursing

    - She has been teaching nursing to graduate and undergraduate students.

    - She started her career as a nurse in the 1980s.

    - Her major interests involve virtual simulations.

    - For her, online teaching can be more creative and offer more possibilities for students to excel. 

• Ruth Rosenblum

  • Associate Professor, School of Nursing

    - She has been teaching at San Jose State for almost fifteen years.

    - She is actively involved in the Doctor of Nursing Practice online program for almost ten years.

    - She is looking forward to learning new ways of teaching online with DNP, masters, and undergraduate students in the school of nursing.

College of Professional and Global Education

• José Aguiñaga

  • Lecturer, School of Information

    - Besides working as an instructor at San Jose State University, he has been an academic librarian for twenty-five years.

    - He is well-versed with the transition and evolution of the internet and technology. He is looking forward to expanding the knowledge base.

    - He is looking to incorporate new teaching practices, teaching tools like FlipGrid, and learning about universal design learning.

• Lori Lindberg

  • Lecturer, School of Information

    - She has been involved in the teaching profession since the late 1980s and has been teaching at San Jose State University since 2002.

    - She has experience with distance learning using closed-circuit television.

    - Since 2008, she has been part of an online teaching Master of Library and Information Science program.

    - She is well versed in different aspects of online education, possible obstacles faced in online training, and different methods used by other universities for online teaching.

    - With this program, she aims to learn more tools and get to know more colleagues.

    - Moreover, she wants to share her experience and knowledge of online teaching like T3 sessions.

    - She is a member of 菠菜网lol正规平台's iSchool of WISE Consortium and was a WISE educator for the year 2020 and 2012.

    - Along with this, she is also excited about her historic house being moved to a different place.

• Rosanne Macek

  • Lecturer, School of Information

    - She is a three-time graduate from San Jose State University.

    - She has worked with different hi-tech companies and with local government in the past and recently retired as the library director for the city of Mountain View.

    - She continues teaching part-time after retirement and all of her classes are completely online.

    - Her online classes have students all over the country, which allows her to work with a diverse group of students.

    - Her major interests in online learning are online grading practices.

• Kristen Rebmann

  • Professor, School of Information

    - She has been teaching online for almost thirteen years at San Jose State University.

    - Her major interests are addressing the issues of diversity and inclusion in online education and are looking forward to including them in her research.

College of Education

• Krissy Connell

  • Lecturer, Child & Adolescent Development

    - She has been teaching for the last fifteen years with a focus on the social and emotional development of children and adolescents

    - For the past six years, she has been using a hybrid approach, where students watch videos at home and perform more interactive activities during class hours.

    - She aims at learning ways to make online education more interactive in more effective ways.

• Lara Kassab

  • Assistant Professor, Teacher Education

    - She has been involved in teaching and education for twenty years now as a credentialed instructor.

    - The transition of using digital tools in education led to her doctoral research.

    - She aims to learn and improve skills in face-to-face professional development, coaching, and mentoring and converting them into an online learning community.

• Matthew Love

  • Assistant Professor, Special Education

    - He has been a teacher for about ten years that includes three years at the school level, three years at the university level, and the last two years at San Jose State University as an assistant professor.

    - Using technology to teach has been his research area and exploring the instructional technologies to support students with disabilities has been his prime focus.

• Amita Shah

  • Lecturer, Child & Adolescent Development
    - She has been a lecturer at San Jose State Univeristy for last ten years.

    - Before working at San Jose State Univesity, she was a teacher at Los Angeles Unified School District.

    - She enjoys working with technology and aims to learn more about the best practices available for online teaching.

College of Engineering

• Amir Armani

  • Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering

    - He has been teaching at San Jose State University for the past two years.

    - He started teaching online during his Ph.D. in computer design.

    - Based on his previous experience, he is looking forward to learning more about online grade assessments in online teaching.

• Mahima Agumbe Suresh

  • Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering

    - She has been teaching at San Jose State University for the past two years.

    - She has taught online courses in the past in her teaching career.

    - She aims to gain more insights on teaching in general and online teaching strategies from colleagues.

• Alessandro Bellofiore

  • Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering

    - He has been teaching at San Jose State University for the past six years.

    - He has been fascinated by teaching since his high school days and always looks forward to learning new ways of teaching.

    - He has tried using the flipped classroom approach and other teaching practices for effective learning.

    - Along with learning ways of teaching, he wishes to share his successful teaching methods.

• David Parent

  • Professor, Electrical Engineering

    - He has been teaching in the electrical engineering department for almost twenty years.

    - He has been using educational technology over the years to improve productivity and improve the quality of distance learning.

• Bonnie Hsia

  • - She had to learn using Canvas when she joined 菠菜网lol正规平台 and Zoom quickly during last semester and considers these tools beneficial to stay connected with student and provide suppport for them in mutually beneficial ways.

    - Her favorite part of online teaching is the pre-class time and virtual office hours on Zoom when and answer to the queries of her students.

    - Though she prefers the in-persone classes, she is grateful that she is teaching in this technologically advanced age that allows such interactions.

College of Humanities and the Arts

• John Delacruz

  • Associate Professor, Journalism & Mass Comm

    - He has been teaching full-time since 1999 and started teaching at San Jose State University in 2012.

    - During his career, he has taught courses in design history and graphic design.

    - He has been actively involved in the development of the curriculum and has designed the degree program in advertising and management.

    - Previously skeptical of online learning, now he has been using many online learning tools like Canvas, Zoom, and Adobe apps.

• David Dodick

  • Lecturer, Linguistics & Language Development

    - He has been teaching since the 1990s, and has a special focus on language, literacy and technology.

    - His interest is the pedagogy accompanying the technology, and the implications this has for both mainstream and non-mainstream students.

    - He has taught three online classes in the CSU system  so far, and aims to learn more from different faculty members.

• Faith Kirk

  • Lecturer, Department of English

    - She has been teaching since 2007 and teaching at San Jose State University since 2016.

    - She has been actively part of designing an online writing course for first-year writing students.

    - Moreover, she is inclined to learn more educational tools and online teaching processes.

    - She believes it is important to think of new possibilities rather than fearing obstacles to the online learning process.

• Steven Lin

  • Lecturer, Music & Dance

    - He has been teaching at San Jose State University since 2009.

    - Before moving to California, Professor Lin was a professional musician and doctoral student on the east coast.

    - He also performs solo concerts and performs with a trio named "Black Cedar" and mainly focuses on showcasing music to local bay area composers.

    - He has been teaching online music classes namely "Music Appreciation".

    - Professor Lin has been actively working on redesigning his online classes to include more online educational resources.

    - Being a firm believer in online education, he calls online learning as a good replacement of conventional teaching methods.

    - From this training, he wishes to connect with more like-minded faculty and know more about online learning.

• James Morgan

  • Lecturer, Art & Art History

    - He has been teaching digital media art for ten years at San Jose State University.

    - Most of his subjects are technology-oriented related to media and arts.

    - He aims to learn to help people to connect the online pedagogy and understand the needs of students in a better way.

• Aviza Y. Long

  • Assistant Professor, Spanish, World Languages and Literatures

    - Teaching online has been a positive turing point for her because it forced her to focus on making clear to her students the key takeaways for the course and collecting and organizing materials in service of this goal.

    - This Modality has also permitted her more flexiblity and productivity in her own life, whic has been huge for her personal and mental well-being.

College of Science

• Resa Kelly

  • Professor, Chemistry

    - She has been teaching for about fifteen years at San Jose State University and previously taught high school in 1996.

    - Apart from classes, she has experience in designing her course material using various digital tools.

    - Most of her classes are supplemented with online learning material.

    - Through this training, she aims to learn new creative ways of using technology and improve student involvement in learning.

    - Quoting "The race is not given to the swift but to the one who keeps running" she relates the current scenario of learning new tools is all about to keep learning and keep trying.

• Mary Poffenroth

  • Lecturer, Biological Sciences

    - Along with teaching in the biology department, she has been teaching GLST for environmental studies.

    - She has been creating her original digital content for online and hybrid courses since 2007.

    - With this training program, she aims to cover her blind spots in online teaching and see how other faculty members work in the online environment.

    - She highlights "straight to camera" as her strong point and has peer resources for animation and audio-only for online teaching.

     

• Donald Reed

  • Professor, Geology

    - He has been teaching classes in oceanography, plate tectonics, earthquakes in geophysics from general education to masters level.

    - He was the first one to offer the online class at San Jose State University in 1998 and taught in hybrid mode since 1996. Since then, he had taught around 10000 students.

    - For many years, he was faculty in residence in using technology in online material design with the Center of Faculty in Development.

    - This being his last year at San Jose State University, he is looking forward to this session to learn something new about online teaching.

• Mara Williams

  • Lecturer, Biological Sciences

    - Mara has been teaching upper division and graduate level courses in Biology online since 2002.

    - She has focused on creating clear connections between learning objectives and content within the course easy to navigate user interfaces.

    - She would like to learn more about creating a social presence in online courses so that she can improve student engagement and outcomes.

• Elizabeth Walsh

  • Associate Professor, Meteorology and Climate Science 

     

    - She has been teaching at San Jose State University since 2012 and started her teaching career as a teaching assistant during graduate school.

    - In 2009, she started her doctoral program in science education, which focused on how people learn about climate change.

    - During the course of her career, she has worked with different grants related to curriculum development including many hybrid courses.

    - Many of her courses included innovative tools like social network platforms and online tools.

College of Social Sciences

• Rachel Bryant - Anderson

  • Lecturer, Sociology & Interdisc Social Science

    - She has been in the teaching profession since 2008 and also teaching online classes since 2016.

    - Inclusive education is the center of her interest, and she aims to learn more updated information on this topic.

    - Moreover, she likes to know how other faculty members use online teaching tools and learn about ways of organizing online classes.

• Katherine Chilton

  • Lecturer, History

    - She has been teaching online for ten years and teaching online at San Jose State University for the past six years.

    - Her major subjects include upper-division history and lower-division history and fundamental skills for new historians.

• Kristina Mitchell

  • Lecturer, Political Science

    - She has served as director of online education at Texas Tech University in the department of political science.

    - She has extensive experience in online teaching since 2012 and working with different faculty with different levels of comfort for online teaching.

• Carol-Lynn Perez

  • Lecturer, Communication Studies

     

    - She has been teaching at San Jose State University for fifteen years, where twelve years have been exclusively online.

    - She is Quality Matters (QM) certified and going through the first and second steps of the QM certification process.

    - She aims to learn about other technological tools used and which tools are being well received by other students.

    - Equity and inclusion are her major interests in the training module to learn about getting every student involved equally in an online environment.