IST faculty honored for excellence in online teaching at 2007 ALISE Conference

IST faculty honored for excellence in online teaching at 2007 ALISE ConferenceJanuary 18, 2007SU News ServicesSUnews@syr.edu

Three SU School of Information Studies professors were honored with Excellence in Online Teaching Awards recently at the 2007 Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE) annual conference in Seattle. The awards, presented by the Web-Based Information Science Education (WISE) Consortium, recognize leaders in online information science as defined by excellence in WISE quality metrics, such as training and mentoring, meeting the needs of a diverse student population, and providing communication and feedback.

Professor Barbara Kwasnik received the award for her course Indexing and Abstracting Systems and Services. Students said that they appreciated Kwasnik’s attention to creating an interactive and enjoyable online class as and timely, often humorous feedback.

Adjunct professor Jennifer Hendzlik was honored for her course Adult Popular Fiction and Reader’s Advisory Services, during which she displayed exceptional connectivity to her virtual audience.

Adjunct professor Robert Emborski accepted the award for his course Managing Information Systems Projects. Students were impressed by Emborski’s ability to create global connections in an asynchronous learning environment.

Faculty members who were selected for the award taught one or more WISE courses between summer 2005 and summer 2006, and received nominations from one or more WISE students at an institution other than the instructor’s home institution. The three Syracuse faculty members were among eight total recipients of this year’s award.

“The Excellence in Online Teaching Awards are unique because they are the first awards where students from one program vote on a teaching award for faculty at a different university,” says Bruce Kingma, associate dean and professor at the School of Information Studies and founder of the WISE Consortium. “Cross-institutional initiatives like this show the growth of WISE as a consortium and provide a forum for the faculty winners to share success stories across all of the institutions in the consortium.”

The awards were presented by Kingma as part of the workshop “Best Practices for Online Pedagogy: Preparing WISE Scholars.” Award recipients contributed their own ideas for best practices on such topics as organization, communication and engagement. The workshop, which took place on Jan. 15, also included a presentation on WISE quality metrics, strategies for technical tool use and online community building, and a breakout session.

Kingma also represented the school at ALISE as a member of the panel “A WISE Model of Collaboration: Improve Access, Increase Quality, Diversify Course Offerings.” The panel, held Jan. 17, included an overview and assessment of the WISE Consortium’s activities to date.

WISE was developed to provide faculty training for online pedagogy; establish standards and metrics for online library and information science (LIS) education; and provide a collaborative marketplace for online LIS courses. Since its inaugural year as an online course-sharing model for masters programs in library and information science (LIS), WISE has welcomed 13 LIS programs from participating colleges and universities around the world, and, as of the summer of 2006, has offered 117 online courses to 168 students. WISE pedagogical training has included 116 faculty members and potential faculty members participating in WISE online sessions and face-to-face sessions at the ALISE and ALA conferences.