The 2021 award recipients are Angela Storey, assistant professor in anthropology; Kathy Gosser, assistant professor and director of franchise management in management and entrepreneurship; Rachel Hopp, assistant professor in biology; and Brian Robinson, James Lewis, Nicholas Hawkins, and Gary Eisenmenger in engineering fundamentals.

“We are celebrating faculty who are exploring ideas that help students learn. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, UofL faculty have found new ways to deliver quality instruction while connecting with students online,” said Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning Executive Director and Vice Provost Gale Rhodes. “We were blown away by the applications we received for the first year of this award.”

The TILL received 22 applications for the award, which grants winners $1,000 and an invitation to share their work at the annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference.

Applicants said that innovation is critical to meet the changing needs of students.

“It is important to be a responsive teacher and to situate our work within the specificity of our students, this time, and the context of our world. Specifically, finding ways to put power into the hands of our students is important for me in making decisions about how to teach,” Storey said.

Gosser found that giving her students flexible ways to engage with course content, such as the podcast she launched in her course, increased student participation.

“They tell me that they can exercise while listening, make dinner with their roommates and all listen, and even drive,” she said. “One student told me it doesn’t even feel like school. Their reactions have been my motivation to keep improving my delivery and my guests.”

“We were acutely aware that students were already fatigued by the remote nature of their education, and it was heartwarming to hear that our course was helping students feel interested in their work again,” Robinson said.

During the pandemic, the team from the J.B. Speed School of Engineering used classroom response systems to build a collaborative online environment similar to the makerspace used for face-to-face courses.

Hopp also explored ways to bring active learning methods to her online course.

“I decided I was not going to slip back into the old passive ways of instruction just because those were the simplest ways to deliver the material online,” she said. “Instead, I created an online environment that closely mimicked our Belknap Academic Building-classrooms where students stay in small, table-like groups for discussion throughout class while still being connected to the larger class audience and the instructor.”

Rhodes hopes that faculty across campus continue to build on these new ideas in their own courses.

“A common thread for these winning innovations is that they can be used as models in nearly any content area,” she said. “I hope in the year ahead that we will see faculty across campus test, refine and scale these practices in addition to exploring their own ideas.”

The Department of Physiology was recognized for its development of a rigorous research program in the scholarship of teaching and learning to assess the effectiveness of alternative teaching pedagogies with professional students in the Schools of Medicine, Dentistry and Graduate Studies. This research indicates that active learning strategies, such as engaging lectures, online modules and team-based learning, produce significant gains in student study skills, performance, motivation, class attentiveness and information retention.

According to the department’s award submission, these newly implemented teaching methods have “revitalized the departmental teaching mission, improved communication about teaching efforts, and ultimately made classroom interactions more positive, beneficial and inspiring for both faculty and students.”

The Paul Weber Award for Departmental Excellence in Teaching was established in 2005 by then-Provost Shirley Willihnganz to sustain a culture of teaching excellence, reward departments who collaborate to enhance student learning, encourage collegiality and more. The award is named in memory of Dr. Paul Weber, a distinguished teacher, scholar and mentor at UofL.

Faculty Favorites

Also during the luncheon, Billingsley recognized the four 2015-16 Faculty Favorite Award winners: Judith Danovitch, Denise Cumberland, Stephan F. Gohmann and Ayman El-Baz.

, is described by students as being “interesting and engaging.” She received her AB in Psychology and Biology from Harvard in 2000 and her PhD in Psychology from Yale in 2005. Her research interest is “how children seek out and evaluate knowledge throughout their development.” 

, is described by students as being “engaging” and “enthusiastic.”

Cumberland spent most of her career in corporate marketing, but fell into adjunct teaching on the advice of a friend. She enjoyed it enough to pursue her PhD at UofL, earning her doctorate in łÉČËÖ±˛Ąal Leadership and Organizational Development in 2012. 

, is described by students as being “driven and passionate” and “very insightful.” 

Gohmann has been at UofL for almost 20 years. He was named director of the Schnatter Center when the center opened in 2015.

Dr. Ayman El-Baz, associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering, has 12 years of hands-on experience in the fields of bioimaging modeling and computer-assisted diagnostic systems. He has developed new techniques for analyzing 3D medical images, and his work related to novel image analysis techniques for lung cancer and autism diagnosis have earned him multiple awards.

In February, 2016, El-Baz became the acting chair of Bioengineering.

Students recognized him for being accessible in and out of the classroom, and working with them until they understand the subject matter.

This year, students submitted 624 nominations for 334 faculty members to the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning, which solicits the nominations. The top four professors to receive the most nominations are recognized as “Faculty Favorites.”

More photos from the Delphi Center’s Celebration of Teaching and Learning event are .