Opened Practices Users Working in: English Department

27578 S Buffalo Gap Rd

For the last three years Ronda Dorsey Neugebauer has served Chadron State College, an open-enrollment institution located in the northwestern corner of Nebraska, as Academic Support Center Coordinator, Director of Transitional Studies, and Instructor in college success and literacy courses. The student population she works with are most at-risk; thus, one of her critical roles is bridging higher education academics with student services. Of Chadron's annual Entering Freshmen, over 40% are deficient in core subject areas of reading, writing, and/or math and over 67% are first-generation/low income status.

In May 2011, she was afforded the opportunity to participate in the Kaleidoscope Project, funded by a Next Generation Learning Challenges Wave One grant. This project's focus was developing a consortium of institutions to collaborate in designing general studies courses utilizing existing Open Education Resources (OER). The experience gained in this project dramatically affected the direction of Chadron's Transitional Studies Program embracing more consistent, creative, and dynamic courses without a dependency on expensive textbooks.

When she isn't "working at work," Ronda, her husband, Keith, and their two young children, Sheldon and Aubrey, are working on the family's Red Angus cattle ranch in Oral, South Dakota.

Shanks Hall

As an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech, I have been teaching online since 1996, both as the sole instructor of a course and with other instructors in collaborative enterprises. My academic expertise is in medieval literature and Shakespeare, with a PhD from Cornell University in 1987. My online teaching experience includes courses in Speculative Fiction, Detective Fiction, and the Survey of English Literature. I am currently engaged in research about using wikis as a collaborative means of teaching, and I am supporting that research by using wikis in my own classes in Scholar.