hot classes for summer

Story by Kelsey Sutton

Think summer school is not cool? Think again! The University of Sioux Falls is offering a wide variety of unique and interesting courses this summer in many different content areas. MED335: Email Marketing, ART101, Drawing 1, and EDU390, Special Topics in Education are just a few that will be offered during this upcoming summer.

ART 101: Drawing I

ART101, Drawing I, is taught by an associate art professor, Ceca Cooper. Cooper has been at USF for 17 years and has been teaching this course every semester, and several summers since then. According to Cooper, ART101 “is an intro-level course that offers a variety of approaches to drawing designed to sharpen perceptual skills, stimulate imagination and increase students’ ability to see and interpret.” This three-credit introductory level course has no prerequisites and satisfies the Liberal Arts Core creative arts credit. Cooper loves teaching this class because “everyone, no matter what level of drawing skill they come in with, will see a huge improvement in drawing skill at the end of the course.”

Student Felicity Tee sketches her own hand in drawing class.

photo courtesy of Ceca Cooper

The education department is offering a new course for the first time this summer called Special Topics in Education, taught by Rose Philbrick and Constance Krueger. This course is for students aspiring to take the PRAXIS “CASE” (Core Academic Skills for Educators) exam which consists of reading, writing, and mathematics. There are three separate one-credit-hour classes with no prerequisites, and students can choose to take one, two, or all three of these courses offered this summer.

EDU390

EDU390A is PRAXIS Boot Camp-Writing, taught by Krueger, and helps students to better understand the PRAXIS exam, writing prompts, and utilize the writing skills needed to successfully pass the exam. Krueger, a USF alumna and a supervisor of teacher residents has 42 years of experience as a writing teacher.

Rose Philbrick, USF alumna and supervisor of teacher residents is a former Math coach and Interventionist and also taught EDU314 (K-8 Math Methods) in the fall semester of 2019. Philbrink will be teaching EDU390B and EDU390C.

EDU 390B- PRAXIS Boot Camp-Mathematics will help future educators to better understand “the test and test-taking strategies, square roots and exponents, ratio and proportions, algebraic expressions, equations and inequalities, functions, congruence and similarity, trigonometry, geometric measurement, statistics and probability, categorical and quantitative data.” EDU 390C - PRAXIS Boot Camp-Reading, will teach the student “the test and test-taking strategies, comprehension, text themes, and main ideas, evaluating arguments and reasoning, word choice, figurative language, structure and organization, and point of view.” Each of these classes is designed to help students planning on taking the PRAXIS.

MED335: Email Marketing

MED335 Email Marketing, is taught by Nancy Sutton, who started teaching at USF in the fall of 2018. Sutton helped to design and create new social media courses offered at USF. Though the program started as a degree completion program, it has evolved from five classes to a certificate, to a Social Media Minor. Sutton taught the class last summer for the first time and successfully created a curriculum that teaches students to utilize and “build an email marketing strategy, create and manage email campaigns and subscription lists, explore design options using web development tools, measure the campaign results with analytics, and understand how email marketing fits into an overall business strategy.”

Having personally taken this three-credit degree completion program class without any prerequisites, this reporter learned so many valuable skills about managing campaigns and the strategies you can utilize to make email marketing as effective as possible.