Human-Centered Teaching in a Digital Classroom Environment

Beate Kinzel: Be available. Be relevant. Be human.

Beate Kinzel arrived at teaching through a path that spans continents, disciplines, and decades. She spent 20 years as an Air Force leader, managing weather station operations and supporting military aviation through multiple combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. After leaving the military, she earned three graduate degrees (in psychology, business administration, and curriculum design) and began building a second career as an educator and trainer. After teaching for several years in other locations, she joined UMGC in 2017, teaching courses in information management, data literacy, and program exploration for technology students.

Kinzel's teaching philosophy can be distilled to three phrases she returns to again and again: be available, be relevant, be human. The words are not decorative; each maps to a concrete practice.

Being available means she does not wait for students to struggle in silence. She sends a personalized welcome email and a recorded introductory video a full week before the official start of each course, walking learners through what to expect, what she expects from them, and signaling from the outset that she is present and approachable. Throughout the term, she holds individual and group Zoom sessions where students can work through assignments in real time.

Being relevant, to Kinzel, means connecting coursework to the actual lives her students are living. Troy Donahue, who works in project management and operations, and who nominated Kinzel for the Drazek Award, described how her data analysis assignments mirrored real workplace scenarios-showing not just how to use Excel, but why the underlying skills matter for decision-making and strategic planning. That bridge between classroom and workplace, he wrote, "reinforced how these skills contribute to my long-term career goals."

Being human means treating grading as teaching moments. Every assignment comes back to learners with detailed feedback: what was missed, why it matters, how to improve. She describes this not as evaluation but as guidance.

Kinzel's signature innovation is instructional video. For complex assignments, she records step-by-step walkthroughs that students can pause, rewind, and return to for refreshers. These tools are especially valuable for learners navigating language barriers, working with unfamiliar software, or who simply absorb information better through demonstration than written words. The videos have become so popular that she now shares them with every instructor teaching the same courses.

"Her step-by-step video tutorials transformed assignments into opportunities for discovery, rather than tasks to complete," Donahue wrote in his nomination. "Because she anticipated questions and explained the "why" behind each step, I found myself not just completing the assignments but truly understanding and enjoying the learning process."