Instructor Spotlight: Meet Dr. Olcay Akman

Introducing Olcay Akman, a dedicated educator with over 25 years of partnering with Hawkes Learning. Dr. Akman is a professor teaching introductory statistics and beginning calculus courses, where he has seamlessly integrated Hawkes’ resources to enhance student learning. With a passion for teaching and a commitment to student success, he emphasizes flexibility and compassion, ensuring each student has the opportunity to thrive. Our Customer Experience Coordinator Victoria Kelly was excited to get the chance to interview Dr. Akman to explore the roots of his educational passion and the valuable lessons he’s acquired along the way.

*Interview responses have been lightly edited for content and clarity.

What courses do you teach with Hawkes Learning?

I teach an introductory statistics course. My wife is also a professor; I introduced Hawkes to her when she taught Calculus and she agreed to use Hawkes for her calculus class, so basically, I teach both Stat and Beginning Calculus using Hawkes’ Beginning Statistics and Essential Calculus titles. Our offices are next to each other, she’s Dr. Akman too. Today when I told her that I was going to meet with you, she asked me to tell you how happy she was that I got her into Hawkes for Calculus.

I’ve shared Hawkes with every institution I went to. I joined Illinois State in 2004 and introduced Hawkes which is still used in our Math 150 course, Fundamentals of Statistical Reasoning. I designed the whole course based on my experience with Hawkes prior to when I had joined ISU. I actually taught at the College of Charleston for a while, and so after I introduced Hawks to ISU, several instructors started using it as well.

Overall, how long have you been teaching?

I received my doctorate in 1994, so 2024 will be my thirtieth year teaching as a Ph. D. Altogether, I’ve been teaching since 1983 in some capacity so, I would say, in total, I have been teaching for almost 40 years.

Throughout the 40 years, do you have a secret to teaching that you rely on?

Early in my career, I had an epiphany that students are human, too, and they are somebody’s kids. We should not treat them with an “us against them” mentality, but rather as individuals, and we should not be punitive for life getting in their way. I think that when I woke up to this fact, I felt like I became a better teacher.

It sounds like that would probably be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned as a teacher throughout the years… Are there any other really valuable lessons and takeaways that you’ve gained throughout the years?

Another valuable lesson I learned was actually from witnessing my own son in an undergraduate program. When he was an undergraduate student, I observed some of his instructors. During his struggle with some health issues, some of his professors were not accommodating. For instance, one semester he had a very severe cold that infected his lungs, and he couldn’t make one of his assignment deadlines. He requested an incomplete in the course, but the professor was very dismissive. When I observed that I took it to heart, and I adopted this philosophy that I would be as accommodating as possible to my own students.

If a student calls me to say they’re sick and cannot make the exam, I am going to meet them where they are so we can form a plan together to make up the exam.

It’s apparent that your compassion just flows through your teaching. That is awesome – I’m sure that your students really appreciate that. What are some of the biggest challenges that students are facing?

So there are two answers to this question: you have pre-COVID and post-COVID answers. Let’s talk about pre-COVID first.

I am one of the first instructors in Hawkes’ history who started using the Hawkes software as a stand-alone course. When I started in 1998, Hawkes was designed to be a supplemental resource to an existing course. When Hawkes began to position their offerings as a complete homework system, I was one of the first ones who started using it as a standalone course. Back then, this was such an original idea to Hawkes, that programming was still in the infancy stage. I was able to work closely with some of the lead developers with Hawkes to provide my feedback, and they worked very hard to accommodate my requests.

When I first used Hawkes as a standalone course, the first big challenge I had was getting students to actually study. How would I get them to Certify the material themselves and attempt to learn the material without someone holding their hands? We approached this by providing lecture notes, video clips, and additional learning resources. I would regularly look at their classroom activities to see how long they had spent on the Learn module or the Practice module. Using this information, I could guide the students in how they should invest their time.

Monitoring time spent and providing a few additional supportive resources seemed to work…until COVID. I think now, the generation we have in our classes is the generation that came from the COVID shutdown. They seem to have trouble independently solving problems, which requires a different approach than “Please watch this clip and then come to my office hour, and I’ll help you.” Quite honestly, I don’t think I have found the solution to this problem yet. I am interested in research that studies this phenomenon – education articles that study the long-term impact of COVID on education.

And as a side note, since I was the very first one who started using Hawkes as an online standalone course, I went to local mathematics meetings, JSS meetings and other educational meetings to share with our Math and Statistics community how Hawkes is so effective. I used to go to many conferences on Hawkes’ behalf to introduce the idea of the Hawkes Learning experience, but I think now the idea caught up!

I am an organizer of a conference that is in biomathematics and ecology, education, and research (the BEER Conference). This is the second biggest biomathematics conference in the United States since the biomathematics community is an interface of biology and mathematics.

All of the Covid research, cancer research, global warming research – all of these are actually biomathematics. It’s a great conference! As a social activity, we even organize a soccer match between biologists and mathematicians.

That’s awesome! How has Hawkes’ unique mastery approach made a difference in your courses?

When I first started using Hawkes in 1998, I was at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. I was kind of ahead of my peers in terms of using technology.

When I found out about Hawkes’ mastery approach, it was like a light bulb sparked in my head, and I am still such a proponent of that idea. Inspired by Hawkes, I use the mastery approach in most of my courses, even in my graduate courses. I am a proponent of using homework, not as a punitive tool, but rather as a learning platform.

A few years ago, I had a student who couldn’t certify all the lessons by the time the exam was due, and therefore got 0 on the test. After this incident, I received an angry email from a parent regarding the situation. This allowed me to explain the concept of Certify and why I use the mastery approach, explaining that her son was not being penalized, but rather he was being held accountable for truly learning the material before proceeding with the examination. I reminded her that an exam was a test to see how much her son had truly learned, and certifications were the method to prepare him for that examination. His mother actually thanked me, and I was glad she could understand my approach to the homework process.

How have your thoughts about technology in the classroom evolved over time? I know you’ve seen Hawkes go through a lot of changes!

When I started with Hawkes, you had to get a physical disk from the school bookstore and install it on individual computers. Then one year, we got a server to use in our computer lab so that we could use computer software more effectively.

As an early Hawkes user, I gave feedback directly to the Hawkes engineers and developers. A specific example of how they used my feedback is found in the Hawkes Grade Book chat option feature. Back then, we didn’t have Google Meet or Zoom, so we needed a chat option to quickly communicate with our students.

Awesome. I think that a great testament of how we really try to listen to our customers.

Right – Hawkes values customer feedback; that’s a selling point to all of my colleagues. I always tell my colleagues and my students I have never seen a better, more responsive, more prompt, more caring tech support or customer support system than Hawkes offers.

Do you have a favorite breakthrough moment that you’ve experienced with the student?

I had a struggling student in my class, and one day he came to my office to talk with me. He said, “You know what? I finally understood when I was certifying these assignments. I finally understood how to study and how to learn the material— I practice problems!” I checked his activities on the Hawkes report dashboard. He was really studying the material and practicing problems, and thus he would generally only need one attempt to Certify. Keep in mind that he was really struggling; now, he’s one of the most prominent computer scientists! He worked at IBM for years, and now he has his own company. He hires our students as interns. That’s my breakthrough. If I saved one student from falling through the cracks, I think I did alright.

Oh, I love that story! To see how he took what he learned in his experience to be able to turn around and invest that in the next students. That’s fantastic. Thank you for sharing that!

What is something that your students do not know about you?

I am a college NCAA soccer referee. I am also an avid camper and an avid hiker. During the COVID shutdown, I taught some of my classes from a van that I converted into a camper on the Appalachian Trail; that’s one of the best memories of my teaching career.

You mentioned earlier that you help lead the BEER conference, what are some other professional activities that you’re involved in?

Yes, I am the main organizer of The International Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research (BEER). I also organize an undergraduate research experience workshop called The Cross Institutional Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE).

I also work with the NSF REU Program. We work with undergraduate students to train them in how to conduct research from simple programming to scientific writing, to lab work if necessary. By the time these students are finished with their undergraduate degree, they are published authors which greatly improves their chances of continuing to pursue higher degrees in education. That is a project I started in 2014 that I am very proud of.

Additionally, I’m the Chief Editor of Spora, the only internationally refereed student-oriented resource journal in biomathematics. Spora is very student-friendly and provides students with constructive feedback on how to improve their journal submissions, allowing students to become student authors and provide experience. I hope that the Spora journal, the undergraduate research workshop, and the BEER Conference will remain my legacy.

Those are all amazing. It sounds like you stay very busy, but busy doing really fantastic things. What is your favorite thing about your campus in Normal, Illinois?

Normal is a twin city to Bloomington, Illinois. Bloomington has all the best features and advantages of big cities without the cons that often come with a big city. It’s a nice Midwest town where it’s easy to raise a family. I am a big classical music buff. In a town of our size, generally, you wouldn’t find a symphony orchestra, large bookstores, a cultural concert, a ballet, etc. However, we have all of those! I would say that my favorite part of my campus is the fact that ISU is the biggest small-town university.

What are you currently researching yourself, or what are you currently reading?

Since 2020 I’ve been exclusively working on COVID modeling and COVID predictions. I have published extensively on this topic to the degree that some of our models in 2020 performed better than CDC’s own models. In May 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still new to the US, we published a paper on COVID modeling. A newspaper interviewed me, and asked about models and I predicted August COVID mortality rates would be 170,000. On August 15, 2020, the actual COVID mortality report was 170,456. Since then, I’ve continued studying COVID-19’s impact. Initially, there wasn’t much focus on poverty and COVID-19. I became interested in researching people who live in poverty, people who don’t have access to healthcare, and people who live in states with expanded Medicare versus no Medicare. That’s a bit of what I’ve been working on during the last three and a half years.

Instructor Spotlight: Meet Dr. Olcay Akman

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