The mentor program is being revised and will resume in the future.
Academic Year 2022-23 Mentors
Katie Rupe
Katie Rupe is an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department. She teaches math content and pedagogy courses for prospective K-12 teachers. Before coming to WWU, she taught middle school math in Chicago Public Schools for 10 years. Katie’s passion for high quality online instruction began when she joined WWU in the Fall of 2020 – what a perfect time to learn to teach online! During the year of remote learning, Katie worked with her students to develop interactive mini-lectures, formative assessments that included student choice and instructor feedback, and structures for making the synchronous instruction time meaningful. She continues to teach summer courses online and appreciates the accessibility and flexibility that online courses can offer. Katie loves to use elements of Universal Design for Learning in her course planning and looks forward to opportunities to learn and support others in this mentorship role.
Sheila Webb
Sheila Webb is a professor in the Department of Journalism. She teaches editing and design, research methods, history of mass media, and ethics. As former Chair of the Academic Coordinating Commission, she became very familiar with WWU’s curriculum and the course proposal process. She has been active in web pedagogy since the early days of the World Wide Web. While at the University of Wisconsin, she was Project Manager for Online@UW, the largest hyperlinked site of civic practice organizations in the world. At WWU, she applied those skills to her classes. She believes that online learning is where education is progressively headed and has explored ways to create the best possible outcomes for her students. She teaches the history of journalism class online in the summers, so routinely updates that class to foster student engagement. She is very grateful she took the CIIA-ATUS workshop on the pedagogy of online teaching Winter Quarter 2020! She has adopted strategies covered in that workshop in both her remote and online classes since. She enjoys the process of collaboration and looks forward to working with individual faculty who wish to update a current online class, to propose an online class, or to consider how to construct such a class.
