C OV E R S TO RY
UCM Gets Creative KMOS-TV, College of Education Create a New Kind of Classroom
By Kathy Strickland
When students left the University of Central Missouri for spring break, they had no way of knowing they would not return to campus to finish the semester. Nor could they have imagined how their worlds would be altered. But there’s one thing all of the students, staff and faculty who carried on in the face of the pandemic demonstrated: this university community is Mule Strong! Faculty across UCM didn’t miss a beat adapting coursework to an online environment, and after just one week of preparation following spring break, nearly 2,000
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virtual classrooms were up and running. Out of this challenging situation grew a different kind of classroom that had not existed before. Josh Tomlinson, ’02, director of broadcasting services at the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) station on UCM’s campus, created KMOS Classroom to provide standardsbased, grade-level instruction to families who were suddenly separated from the educational system they knew. “Once school started shutting down, I knew KMOS had to do something,” says Tomlinson, who came up with the idea
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in early spring. He took the concept to PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger, who was also strategizing ways to serve their member stations’ communities when schools began to close. Especially in locations where broadband is an issue, including rural and urban communities, broadcast was a way to reach students who did not have access to online learning resources. “In a circumstance like this, we were able to step up,” Kerger says of efforts like KMOS Classroom, which she’d like to see expand to other university stations. “We’re storytellers, we
know how to use the platform, our roots are in education, and I think the most important secret ingredient is our stations live in the communities that we serve.” This year marks the 50th anniversary of PBS, the nation’s largest noncommercial media organization, with more than 330 member stations across the United States. Kerger says her team had been planning retrospectives and a series of events to mark the milestone. Then the pandemic shifted their direction toward serving the public through educational programming, as they have
