Profile

Mark comes to the LLC Program from our sister institution, University of Maryland University College (UMUC), where he is Executive Assistant to the Provost and an adjunct faculty member teaching expository writing.  UMUC is now one of the largest providers of online higher education in the world, so in addition to teaching online Mark is involved in many of the initiatives related to online pedagogy that are underway at UMUC.  He advises and assists the Provost in a variety of aspects of “the virtual university” and serves on committees dealing with such issues as outcomes assessment, student success and retention, and shared governance in the online environment.

Mark received his B.A. in Russian and his M.A. in Slavic Studies from Florida State University.  While conducting the research for his M.A. thesis, which examined how speakers of Russian adapt foreign verbs into their grammatical/syntactic system, Mark became fascinated by the challenges that Russian graduate students were facing in U.S. higher education settings.  He was particularly interested in their struggles with American academic English and with the expectations for reading and writing proficiency in U.S. graduate school courses.  This interest was renewed in 1997 when Mark joined UMUC as it was beginning to experience the astonishing growth in demand for fully online courses and degree programs that continues to this day.

In his research here at UMBC, Mark intends to focus on the challenges faced by speakers of other languages when participating in fully online U.S. graduate courses.  Specifically, he would like to design and test interventions, in the form of short online courses or workshops, to prepare speakers of other languages for the writing and discourse demands of online graduate study at a U.S. institution.  It is his hope that these and similar interventions will help UMUC in its goal of ensuring that all incoming graduate students, regardless of their nations of origin or undergraduate education, will have the writing and discourse skills necessary to succeed in their chosen graduate degree programs.

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