Inglis Honored as SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador

By Bill Bruton

“The honor was a pleasant surprise. It stems from the teaching approach I’ve taken the last few years where I adopted a flipped classroom approach to teaching,” Inglis says. “As part of that, it involved prerecording my lectures and making them available online.”

Inglis has been at the forefront of utilizing online teaching resources.

“I was looking at a way to make the material available beyond just my classroom. I thought it was a real opportunity to be able to reach out beyond the confines of the university and reach a group that was just interested in learning,” Inglis says. “So I started developing open educational resources and open access materials in generating my videos, so that I could open them up on YouTube without concerns about copyright restrictions. As a result, I had people from a variety of places around the world who have reached out to ask me questions or just sent their thanks and appreciations.”

“Last year, one of the first-year medical students, on the first day of Gross Human Anatomy, came up and shook my hand and said he was really excited to meet me because he’d been learning from all my videos,” Inglis adds. “I don’t know whether that was a factor in him choosing to attend the University at Buffalo or not, but it’s quite the honor to, on occasion, have people come up to me and say ‘oh, you’re the guy who does the anatomy videos, and I’m learning a lot from them.’”

Inglis enjoys coming up with new ways of learning.

“It’s an honor, but it’s also an opportunity for me to promote this idea further, to be able to get more interest in the content. Along those lines, because SUNY has a vested interest in open access material and developing educational material for the masses, I think it has really helped to use as an example how other individuals have made their content more accessible,” Inglis says. “Now, more than ever before, just making quality educational material that’s developed by experts in the field that can be easily accessed — when there’s so many sources of disinformation out there — and having a solid impactful source of information that people can have access to is quite important moving forward. By making it available to the general public, there’s a chance for everyone to improve their educational level.”

Inglis has long been using a flipped classroom approach for his teaching of gross anatomy. His in-class video sessions are active learning, where students are challenged with clinical questions that they work in groups to solve. 

He will be honored at the 2023 SUNY Summit March 8-10 in Syracuse.