About

Terri Van Sickle
Instructional Content Specialist

Welcome! I’m glad you’re here, and I look forward to helping you reach your goals. I enjoy working with individuals, non-profits, educational organizations, and businesses to tell their story. Before you place your trust in me, you’ll want to know a bit more about me.

Biographical Summary

Terri has been an educator for more than 20 years and has taught online for nearly a decade.  Prior to starting her teaching career in public high schools where she taught for ten years, Terri earned a BA in English at East Carolina University in 1993 and worked in the printing and publishing industry as a print shop manager, a proofreader, and a graphic designer. After earning a MEd in Secondary English Education at the University of Georgia, she carried her design and editing skills into her high school teaching career where she taught English and journalism classes and led student teams producing newspapers and yearbooks.

Terri began her foray into online course development and instruction in 2010 while working on a graduate-level Certificate in Technical and Professional Writing at ECU. There, she was a member of the partnership between East Carolina University’s Tar River Writing Project and Nash-Rocky Mount Schools to create a professional development training module in Moodle for high school English teachers. She enjoyed the project so much, she decided to pursue a career in online teaching, so she earned her Certificate in Online Teaching through NC LEARN, UNC-Chapel Hill in 2011, and she began teaching in the NC Community College System within a month. Since then, Terri has continuously developed and taught online and/or blended college transfer credit courses including ENG 111–Writing and Inquiry, ENG 112–Writing and Research in the Disciplines, ENG 114–Professional Research and Reporting, ENG 231–American Literature I, and ACA 122–College Transfer Success.

Since she made the shift to the community college system and online teaching nearly ten years ago, Terri has worked with two Institutional Effectiveness teams to design and implement Quality Enhancement Plans, one of which allowed her the opportunity to develop an online writing center at Beaufort County Community College and to serve as coordinator of the college’s writing curriculum.  In another role that expanded her online design skills, Terri was coordinator of Craven Community College’s ACA College Transfer Success program where she authored and designed a digital textbook that has been used by all ACA 122 students at that college since 2017. Also, at Craven Community College, Terri led three Liberal Arts and University Transfer departments for two years as Chair of English, Communication, and Humanities. In that position, she supervised 30 online and blended course instructors and reviewed their classes. Terri’s experiences with Craven Community College’s internal quality review team, Community of Online ReDesigners (CORD), compelled her to become a certified Quality Matters peer reviewer, which she did in 2020.

Amidst the pandemic of 2020, Terri saw a skyrocketing need for online learning support and quality assurance. It was an opportunity to share her passion for and expertise in online course design and continuous improvement as well as an opportunity to grow her four-year old, part-time consulting business into a full-time venture. Terri is now self-employed as an academic and corporate learning consultant.