Northern Essex’s Schade and Martin Receive Awards for Building Online and Hybrid Courses

Patricia Schade and Brian Martin. (Courtesy photographs.)

Two Northern Essex Community College faculty members were recently recognized by Massachusetts Colleges Online for their work on their online and hybrid courses.

Courses designed by Patricia Schade and Brian Martin each won an MCO Course of Distinction—or COD—Award. They are presented to state faculty who develop and teach innovative online and hybrid courses that creatively use eLearning instructional tools to enhance teaching and promote student success.

Schade’s Reading, Writing and Reasoning course was nominated by the College Coordinator of Instructional Technology and Online Learning Sue Tashjian. Schade uses Open Educational Resources—various free instructional materials—in the course.

Tashjian wrote that the course “…emphasizes engaged and reflective learning. A module may include a recorded mini-lectures, readings, a discussion forum, a journal and a writing activity helping students apply and synthesize their learning.”

Christina Gardner Burns, an instructional technologist in the Center for Instructional Technology, nominated Martin’s Drawing II course. When classes moved online due to the pandemic, Martin produced a series of videos that allowed students to feel as if they were still in the same studio. “It’s as if they are looking over his shoulder,” Burns wrote in her nomination.

Northern Essex offers 304 courses that are either entirely online or provided in a hybrid format and registration is open now for fall 2022.

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