Katy Koch, a longtime University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) professor with the Europe Division, last year spent up to 20 hours each week bouncing across a Middle East desert in a military bus. She shuttled over serious potholes and bided her time when the bus yielded to camel traffic as she traveled from one military installation to another to teach writing, literature, public speaking, communications and mythology courses.
Koch didn’t really need to make the back-and-forth commute—she was allowed to anchor herself at a single military location and teach her students at remote bases via Zoom—but that isn’t how she wanted to engage with her servicemember students.
“It makes a huge difference to me to connect with the students,” she said. “I love to teach, but one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching for me is getting to know the students on a personal level—having fun with them, joking around, having discussions that allow them to open up.”
Koch is among the 10 UMGC professors selected for this year’s Stanley J. Drazek Teaching Excellence Award, the highest recognition UMGC bestows on faculty members. Nominations for the awards, which carry a $1,200 honorarium, come from students. The 2024 award winners teach across a broad spectrum of disciplines, from history to psychology, from biology to cybersecurity, yet one thing unites them. They are all described as being especially understanding of their students’ complicated lives, which can include full-time jobs, family, military deployments, illnesses, relocations or a combination of those things.
For most of this year’s Drazek winners, that empathy comes from experience. Several of the faculty members served in the military or come from military families. Some were adult learners. Some have even been UMGC students themselves. Many of them have won other recognitions for their teaching and student engagement.
“The Drazek Teaching Awards represent a prestigious recognition that underscores an educator's exceptional commitment to teaching excellence and student success at UMGC,” said Stefan Gunther, associate vice president for faculty affairs. “They highlight the recipient's innovative teaching methods, dedication to fostering an engaging learning environment and their ability to inspire and mentor—one student at a time.”
Koch said her nomadic early life in a military family may be the reason teaching at UMGC, with its global reach and connections to the military, is her dream job.
“I tell my students the stories my dad shared. In communications classes, I use a lot of his lessons, including when we talk about unconscious bias. His military service was the first time he worked with people from the Deep South, from inner cities, from areas across the country… and he said that experience changed his world view,” Koch explained. “He raised his own kids to be very open minded.”
Koch has taught at UMGC since 2004. She started in Germany, but much of her tenure has been in the Mideast, including Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar.
“My students are great students, the best students I’ve ever taught,” she said, noting that her students complete coursework while living under challenging conditions, from sandstorms to incoming missiles.
The Drazek Award coincides with the end of Koch’s full-time career at UMGC. She officially retires on July 31. Despite her relocation to the states to be close to family, she hopes to continue teaching part-time for UMGC at the Travis Air Force Base in California. She will be splitting her time between New Hampshire and California.
“I have lots of frequent flyer miles banked, so I think it can be done,” she said.
The military connection of Drazek winner James Alexander, a professor of health services management, is even more direct. Before adding teaching to his portfolio, he spent 23 years in the Navy, beginning as a medic and advancing into health care administration. He then became the CEO of the Women’s Prison Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina.
He said his service in the health care sector enables him to teach undergraduate and graduates students “from experience.”
Alexander has been on the UMGC faculty since 2016, teaching as an adjunct. He strives to put his students in an “executive mindset” as he prepares them for careers in a complex health care sector, including in challenging settings like prisons. He described his students as the people who “will be my successors at some point.”
“I love teaching because it makes me stay on top of my material. Health care evolves. Teaching is just another form of solidified learning,” he said. “And I learn from my students.”
He is known for his willingness to mentor students and for his compassion.
“It’s empathy. It’s about acknowledging that life happens,” he said. “I have some military students who are active duty, so I understand that you sometimes have to make allowances.”
His favorite part of teaching? “Observing my students becoming empowered, more confident, more capable, and eventually evolving past needing me as a teacher.”
Steven Richman, who teaches in the Cybersecurity Master’s Program, and Professor of History Danielle Mead Skjelver also bring career experience outside academia to the classroom.
Richman, a tech trailblazer, spent many years in leadership positions in data systems planning, design and performance. Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T Labs, Bell Labs, Signatron and a number of startups feature on his resume. He has 29 patents and five patents pending. He has published broadly, principally on security issues.
Mentoring was an important component of his role as a business leader, and Richman has carried that passion to the university. He coaches his students to be their best—and has been doing so since 2009, when he became involved with the launch of UMGC’s cybersecurity program.
“In industry, I always tried to make members of my organization feel like they were part of a community. And now I strive to make my students feel that we’re working together,” he said. “If I get them to talk about more than just technical issues and I talk about myself, I think that helps break down the professor-versus-student barrier.”
He also likes to get students to reflect on facets of technology that extend beyond their coursework.
“In one of my classes, I talk about the [James] Webb Space Telescope, asking the question whether it was a success or not,” he said. “If you look at the pictures that come from it, they’re beautiful. But if you look at the duration of time—it took 30 years and the telescope was well over budget—it is less successful from a business point of view.”
Skjelver, meanwhile, worked in the financial world for a decade before she began her UMGC career, now in its 12th year. She built her career in finance without the benefit of a bachelor’s degree. When she finally decided it was time to continue her education, it was with an eye on changing her profession—a familiar pattern for many UMGC students.
“I know what it’s like when your friends have finished college and you haven’t,” she said. “I know what it’s like to come back to school when you’ve already been successful at a career and you have to jump through hoops you feel like you shouldn’t have to jump through. It takes time in the classroom to recognize the value of a university education, not just the value of the diploma.
“Our students come to us after careers in the military, in real estate, as chefs,” she said. “They’re already professional. They don’t need me to hold their feet to the fire.”
Skjelver also understands the many ways financial struggles can threaten to derail students’ educational aspirations. Because of this, she became an early contributor to the Student Aid Fund for Emergency Relief (SAFER), which was created during the Covid-19 pandemic and provided a safety net for UMGC students around the world who face unexpected crises, from housing and food insecurity to childcare and health care challenges.
Skjelver extends her student engagement beyond the classroom in other ways, most notably as faculty advisor for the History Student Society, which won the Student Organization of the Year Award in 2024 for a third year in a row. The group’s annual International Undergraduate History Conference fields papers from students at colleges and universities across the globe, providing experiential learning and leadership-building opportunities.
Students are also the top priority for the two Drazek winners in Asia. Anita Tam and Christopher Anderson both teach statistics and psychology to undergraduate students in Okinawa, Japan.
Tam is a scientist-practitioner with 25 years of research, teaching and consulting experience. She joined UMGC in 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and students’ lives took on even more challenges.
“I’d always been understanding of student circumstances, and this made me even more understanding,” she said.
Still, Tam is a stickler about her classroom ground rules, which include timeliness, meeting deadlines and being respectful. She also holds herself to three core values: integrity, both as a teacher and as an individual; professionalism; and good communications. She lets the student makeup of each class determine the direction of her teaching.
Tam teaches hybrid classes, both in person and virtually, and she puts high value on her interaction with students. The post-class reflections she embeds in her courses allow her to get to know her students while also gauging the depth of learning taking place.
“Online, I use multiple screens and the students have their cameras on so I can see if they’re incentivized, I can see their body language, and I will call on them,” Tam explained. “I will also engage with them as much as I can in a face-to-face classroom. I want to have an open dialogue.
“Teaching is not so much about teaching as it is learning about my students,” she added.
Tam’s husband is a former Army Infantry officer, her daughter is also an Army officer and her son is a Green Beret, so she also understands some of the experiences her military students go through.
Anderson, meanwhile, thinks some students connect with him because his learning path mirrors theirs. He enrolled in community college at the last minute after underperforming in high school.
“Obviously I had the potential—like a lot of our students do—but in high school I didn’t commit that much to education, mostly because it was compulsory. The more anyone said I had to do something, the less I wanted to do it,” he said. “I wish someone had challenged me more and articulated well the value of rising to the challenge.”
That shortfall when he was in school is what motivates him to bring energy and purpose to his classroom.
Anderson enrolled at the community college to study English, and it was there he discovered the discipline of psychology—"through a compulsory course, which just goes to show that sometimes requirements are good,” he said.
Like Koch, he is the son of a military man. But Anderson has something else in common with his students: He knows what it’s like to be a UMGC student.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Binghamton University, SUNY and, a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from University at Albany, SUNY, Anderson earned an MBA at UMGC. He is now finishing up his thesis for a Master of Professional Studies in Anthropology from UMGC. Some of Anderson’s colleagues on the faculty are also his professors.
Anderson believes students appreciate that he tries “to be 100 percent focused on them and bring a lot of energy” to his three-hour-long classes.
Drazek winner Andrea Davis teaches biology, anatomy, physiology and other courses needed by UMGC Europe students interested in health care careers, including nursing and medicine. Many of her students are fulfilling the prerequisites needed to apply to military programs that prepare professionals to work at the Army’s massive Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
Davis has held senior positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health agencies for the state of Florida, and she brings lessons from those experiences to her courses. She makes class interesting and relevant by teaching from the news headlines.
“COVID, for example, was a great way to … talk about how vaccines are developed or to discuss what a pandemic is,” she said.
During the lockdown, she was instrumental in designing safety protocols that enabled UMGC Europe students to take the in-person lab classes they needed. The pandemic also prompted her to start recording all her classes, a practice she continues so students who miss classes because of military assignments or other obligations don’t fall behind. She believes this type of thoughtfulness may have brought her the Drazek Award.
“I teach dedicated students who are trying to get a degree in a very chaotic environment,” Davis said. “A lot of these students are juggling so many different things and they have a lot of stress on a personal level. I think the students appreciate the fact I’m willing to work with them.”
Davis has a long connection with UMGC. She first taught as an adjunct in 1978 and then on and off in the decades that followed. In 2017, she joined the faculty as a full-time professor.
Like Davis, Adjunct Professor of Sociology Donna Maurer also teaches from the headlines—but in a radically different discipline. She teaches the Sociology of Religion course.
“It’s part of our diversity awareness minor, which is part of our social science program,” she said. “I get a lot of social science majors, students who are going to be grief counselors, for example, but I also get students in business and cybersecurity who take it as an elective.”
The course is not the study of religion or theology but, rather, a look at religion’s role in society, including its connection to the political system.
“Religion is something that people don’t want to discuss but it often leads to conflict in our social institutions,” she added. “I think it’s important to discuss this with students as they become global citizens.”
Maurer said weekly discussion classes open opportunities to talk about how religion influences the headlines.
“We discuss conflicts and cooperation between religions and in society. We look at the commercialization of religion. We have a week when we talk about religion and politics … like the religious composition of the current Congress and whether it reflects the religious composition of the people the congress members represent,” she said. “Or we talk about why so many people are not affiliated with religions.”
At UMGC, she has taken the lead on revising several sociology courses in ways that enable students to develop practical critical-thinking skills and advance their global awareness. She also has helped students move on to graduate school, take part in essay contests and put their writing forward for publication.
Claire E. Cuccio is an adjunct professor for the Master of Science in Cybersecurity Management and Policy Program. She already had a PhD and was teaching basic internet technology classes at UMGC when she learned that the university had a cybersecurity fellowship that would pay for her to obtain additional education. Now, her multiple degrees include a Master of Cyber Policy and Management from UMGC.
Cuccio is known for investing time in grading her students and providing other evaluations.
“I treat their projects as if I’m their boss, and I give them the same feedback I would give an employee,” she said. “I spent 30 years in the Army before this job, and I know that you need to coach, teach and mentor people. I do it because I want them to be better. I want them to learn cyber, but I also want them to learn how to communicate.”
Her military experience means that she also understands “what it’s like to take a course, have a job and deploy. I can identify with my students … and their trifecta of family-work-school.”
In addition to her work as an educator, Cuccio is the CEO of SNV, LC, a cyber company that provides technology, cybersecurity and data science services to U.S. government customers.
“I let my students know that right at the beginning, and I tell them that I’m happy to do a resume review, I’m happy to write letters of recommendations,” she said. “A lot of my students have gone to other graduate programs or doctoral programs and I’ve written many letters of recommendation, even years after teaching them.”
Cybersecurity is also front and center for Denise M. Camillo, who teaches the orientation class for students entering the first-year of the cybersecurity graduate program.
“I’ve been an instructor online for almost 20 years now and my claim to fame is to always teach the first-year students because I really like to give them a skillset they can use throughout their whole academic experience,” she said.
Camillo was not a traditional student. She didn’t head straight to college. Instead, she married young, had a child and then was diagnosed with lupus when she was in her twenties. She had to take a medical leave and decide what was next in her life.
“I was working in health care and had to refocus my career because of my medical struggles,” she said. “That’s when I went back to school and obtained a degree in computer science, thinking that I could start my own business and work from home because that would be better with my illness, which I knew I would have for the rest of my life.”
Later, when she enrolled in an online master’s degree program, she had a professor who did not engage well with his students. “That’s when I decided I would become an online instructor. I felt that I could give students the help I didn’t get,” she explained.
When she was studying for her Ph.D., her husband died. She had to take a break. She resumed her classes but then was injured in a car accident—another setback. In all, it took her seven years to complete the degree.
“I know a lot of struggles students can be going through because I’ve been through them myself. I’ve been there. So, I listen and let them know that I care,” she said. “I help them succeed like I was able to succeed.”
In addition to the Drazek Teaching Excellence Award, the university also recognized 10 faculty members with Teaching Recognition Awards. For Asia, the awards went to Isidra Naig-Coloma and Irina Filonova, while the recipients in Europe were Renaldo Walker and Stefan Stram. The stateside awards were given to Beth Cook and Lonny Wright, who teach First-Term Experience; School of Business professors Marsha Gordon and William Morphet; Jason Cohen in the School of Cybersecurity and Information Technology; and Maureen Walsh David in the School of Integrative and Professional Studies.
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