Meet this month’s featured NIC member, Greg Koscik, nominated by his Faculty Mentor for his exceptional commitment to improving Quantway curriculum and pedagogy.
A Quantway instructor of two years at Nicolet Area Technical College in Wisconsin, Koscik, is playing an important role in one of the Pathways network’s biggest milestones: the development of new, fully-online courses.
With the Pathways online design team, Koscik is helping develop an online Quantway Core course scheduled to roll out in the spring of 2020. He has been heavily involved in the content transformation process, testing, and design of the new virtual course.
As part of the Pathwyas Curriculum Committee, Koscik also reviews assessment items and works on Item Bank improvement. Over the past year, he has systematically organized all items in the Quantway College Item Bank and ensured that all lessons had a sufficient number of items. This revamped Item Bank will be released for use in the fall. He regularly teaches Quantway Core and College both in-person and online.
He said one big draw to teaching and developing Quantway courses is that the curriculum places math in meaningful context for students, which leads to higher retention and success rates.
“The way it is now in most one-size-fits-all (algebra) classes, there’s little to no authentic context. In most traditional classes there’s only solving for X for the sake of solving for X,” Koscik said, adding that Quantway content is something that students genuinely want to learn.
His Faculty Mentor, Aaron Altose of Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio, reaffirmed Koscik’s commitment to creating engaging contextualized lessons.
“Greg is a frequent contributor to the Pathways network, sharing ideas for new Quantitative Reasoning contexts and ways to strengthen the pedagogy and assessments of Quantway College,” Altose said.
“He truly aspires for Quantway College to be the best possible course for his students and also for the health and growth of the Carnegie Math Pathways as a whole.”
Altose added that Koscik continuously seeks ways to both improve the course and increase its rigor.
Koscik also plays a central role in training newly hired adjuncts to teach Quantway at Nicolet as a Faculty Facilitator on his campus.
Beyond his involvement with Carnegie Math Pathways, Koscik is an active member of WisMATYC–the Wisconsin Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges.
Koscik graduated from Oakland University in Michigan with a master’s degree in Mathematics in 2010. He began teaching at Nicolet in 2013 after teaching at College of the Albemarle in North Carolina from 2010 to 2013.
