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1. Teaching Portfolio My teaching experience spans over 15 years, 14 dierent courses (3 graduate, 11 undergraduate), the development of four original courses, and experience with dierent student populations, in dierent settings, with class sizes ranging from extremely small (10) to enormous (170). I have taught across all content areas within the broad area of mechanics, in addition to several courses well outside that area: Course (level) Times Taught Kinematics and Dynamics of Mechanisms (UG) 3 Mechanics III (dynamics, UG) 1 Machine Design (UG) 6 Fundamentals of Tribology (G) 5 Nonlinear Vibrations (G) 1 Finite Elements I (UG) 1 Finite Elements II (UG) 1 Automatic Controls (UG) 6 Advanced Strength of Materials (G) 1 Strength of Materials (UG) 5 Statics (UG) 6 Dynamics (UG) 2 Introduction to Engineering (UG) 2 The Panama Canal (UG) 2 indicates a new course constructed by me accompanied by an extensive set of course notes authored by me (over 130 pages) To really understand how I approach classroom teaching, you should take some time to view one of my course blogs, for instance MAE 2320 Dynamics1 from Spring 2012. The salient points about the course blog site: navigation is easy, access to materials is instant students can discuss issues with each other via the comment threads the tag cloud immediately indicates what is most important in the course the self-contained exam review table quickly summarizes key resources and most importantly, students make important contributions to the learning materials and support each others learning (see especially the Blog Points page)
1http://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/MAE 2320 Dynamics/ 1

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And of course the availability of lecture and problem solutions as recorded videos adds value to the student experience by allowing them to (i) see good problem solving approaches modeled by an expert, and (ii) review authoritative course materials that are exact, portable, and repayable. My teaching certainly did not start with this polished product; rather, this realization of my Dynamics course represents an evolutionary process involving innovative ideas, intuition, andperhaps most importantlydedicated, funded pedagogical research. This document explains my evolution as a teacher, the role of rigorous research (both my own and that of others) in informing my philosophy and approach, and the innovation and creativity I bring to this endeavor. 2. Teaching Statement Teaching in all its forms is arguably the core endeavor of any higher education institution. We educate undergraduate and graduate students, mentor junior colleagues, and otherwise participate in a broad and vigorous educational enterprise. Teaching and learning are not simple endeavors, however. And perhaps more importantly, they are crucial activities worthy of genuine, original scholarship, funded research programs, and wide dissemination of lessons learned. My teaching philosophy therefore encompasses several parts: teaching in a traditional classroom-type environment, teaching in an experiential environment, and the key role of rigorous research in improving teaching and learning. 2.1. Teaching in a Traditional Classroom-type Environment. Most faculty, myself included, spend the bulk of their teaching time in a fairly traditional classroom or laboratory setting. The underpinnings of my approach in such settings can be summarized: Lecture is dead, social constructivism lives. I teach large undergraduate classes with enrollments between 100-180. The accumulated intellectual capital in the room during an in-person class meeting is enormous. Yet, a lecture in which the instructor talks to the learners, working to explain the subject, is a signicant missed opportunity to engage all the intellectual capacity in the room. The ipped classroom is but one example of how to exploit the in-person class meeting as a collaborative, community event. I am a rm believer in the tenets of social constructivism2, which basically states that the communal construction of knowledge and meaning is powerful for the learner, and that learning is a social event. Learning through engagement with peerscall it peer instruction3, peer learning, communities of practicehas been proven over and over to be an eective and powerful approach to teaching and learning. Technology can mediate pedagogy, but is not itself a pedagogy. I am a strong advocate for appropriate use of technology in higher education, and the social aspects of technology (e.g., blogging) mesh closely with my social constructivist leanings.
2For a simple description, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social constructivism; for a more scholarly treatment, see A. S. Palincsar, Social Constructivist Perspectives on Teaching and Learning, Annual Review of Psychology, 49:345-375, 1998. 3Mazur and colleagues, e.g., C. H. Crouch and E. Mazur, Peer Instruction: Ten Years of Experience and Results, Am. J. Phys., 69(9):970-977, 2001.

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My HigherEd 2.0 project4 was the rst formal eort, funded by NSF, to establish best practices for use of web 2.0 technologies in higher education. The results of this work are detailed later, but for now it suces to say that elements of the HigherEd 2.0 paradigm are fairly pervasive and that my research program was several years ahead of the national trend. Education is a closed-loop process, and training is not teaching. Despite the social nature of learning, and despite my advocacy for technology and all its asynchronous benets, the personal relationship between instructor and student remains a central xture of my teaching approach. Students need prompt and detailed feedback about their work, and especially students who struggle need more personalized attention to scaold their learning. While massive open online courses (so-called MOOCs) oer technology-mediated education in a social (web) environment, the missing element of personalized feedback from an actual instructor relegates such courses to something more like skill acquisition (i.e., training) than true, deep, authentic learning5. 2.2. Teaching in an Experiential Environment. A residential educational experience like the one promoted and valued by UVa necessarily means that students must live in Charlottesville to learn in our community. And as a consequence, we choose to use traditional classrooms and laboratories to deliver many of the courses we oer. However, through my recent experiences teaching on Semester at Sea, and my up-coming J-term course, I have become a very strong advocate for an experiential environment for learning. In this context, experiential simply means that I am teaching via an experiencethis could be Semester at Sea, it could be my mentorship of student senior theses via trips to Panama, or it could be my up-coming (January 2013) J-term course taught entirely in Panama. All of those experiential circumstances lead to a transformative learning experience and directly connect to the SEAS brand of rigorous engineering education within a liberal education context. Teaching and Learning in Community. Part of the experiential approach generally means that the instructors and the learners spend signicant time together outside of class. On Semester at Sea or through an international J-term course, the students and instructor are literally living togetherin addition to learning togetherfor a period of time. This structure aords certain advantages for community building, development of a shared understanding of what education means, and student collaboration/building of a cohort identity that simply are not available in a more traditional classroom environment. Experiencing is Learning by Another Name. When I teach my course on the Panama Canal6, there is no substitute for visiting the Canal, seeing ships transit the Canal up close, visiting an active construction site, and talking to practicing engineers
4see also http://highered20.wordpress.com 5I recently signed up for my rst Coursera course (Computing for Data Analysis) because I want to

learn R programming to enable analysis of large datasets. 6see also: http://www.semesteratsea.org/2012/06/11/exploring-the-expansion-of-the-panama-canal/

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who work at the Canal. Students experience their education dierently when they see the scale and operation of the Canal close-up, in person, and this experience clearly adds depth and meaning to the course as compared to learning the same material in a classroom in Charlottesville. The scholarly record is replete with studies that repeatedly and forcefully illustrate the power of experiential learning7. Experiential Learning is a Just Another Form of Social Constructivism. Experiential programs engage students and instructors in the social dimensions of learning in the most intense way. For my J-term course, we will be staying in the same hotel, eating meals together, sharing taxi cabs and buses, and of course participating in the class meetings and eld trips. This shared experienceboth the social and the (what we usually think of as) academictransforms the way students view the course and its contents. Their investment in the course is higher, their retention of material better, and their ability to make connections between other parts of the curriculum and real-world engineering applications is deepened. 2.3. The Role of Rigorous Research in Improving Teaching and Learning. Let us not forget that there are two halves to education: teaching and learning. Good teaching does not always result in good learning, and similarly valuable learning can happen despite sub-optimal teaching. The engineering education literature is quite vast on this issue8, so there is no shortage of guidance on instructional methods that are known to be eective. Moreover, NSF cares deeply about STEM education as a workforce development imperative and national competitiveness issue; the NSF Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR) funding request for FY2013 is nearly $900M9. As people passionate about educationwe are, after all, employed at a universitywe owe it to ourselves and our students to strive for continuous improvement in education, the same way we do with research. Too often we run our academic programs in a largely open-loop way, with only a minimal amount of actionable feedback embedded in the system. We would never run a research program this way; research is driven by evidence, by hypotheses that are posed and tested in systematic ways, by results that are reported to the community and shared widely, by innovations that add value, and by the continuous cycle of improvement, renement, and increasing the depth of understanding. To this end, I feel quite strongly about these elements of research and scholarship about education:
a thorough, if somewhat dated treatment, see Kolb, D. A., Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source for Learning and Development, Prentice-Hall:Englewood Clis, NJ, 1984; for a shorter and more recent treatment, see A. J. Conger et al., Experiential Learning Programs for the Future of Engineering Education, in Transforming Engineering Education: Creating Interdisciplinary Skills for Complex Global Environments (an engineering education summit co-sponsored by IEEE and IBM), Dublin, Ireland, April 2010. 8See for instance the guest editorial in the JEE and the references therein: Streveler, R. and K. Smith, Conducting Rigorous Research in Engineering Education, Journal of Engineering Education, 95(2):103105, 2006. 9Ferrini-Mundy, J., NSF Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Request, accessed July 17, 2012, URL: http://www.nsf.gov/ehr/2013 Budget Resources.jsp.
7For

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education should be the topic of serious research and scholarship; we should approach engineering education as a (curriculum and course) research and design problem and use the tools of research and engineering design to create our educational experience research is required to gure out the most eective ways to provide instruction for students; the research and evaluation are part of our eorts to get smarter through the design process, and they enable use to make good decisions about how to modify the curriculum having an evidentiary basis for what we do in education seems critical, yet we typically provide only the thinnest of evidence for teaching quality or eectiveness of learning, and even then we usually only do it under external motivation (i.e., ABET) to the extent possible, I believe its important to use research methods to understand teaching eectiveness, to experiment and publish about our own educational interventions, and to apply a rigorous approach to designing our education doing anything else betrays our training as professionals, scientists, and engineers, and undermines our intellectual curiosity about how the academic enterprise does and should function 3. Defining Excellence in Teaching What does excellence in teaching look like? This is obviously a dierent question than what do we currently measure? The case for excellence in teaching must recognize those factors known to positively inuence learning, because learning (or, perhaps, the achievement of specic learning outcomes) is, after all, the basic goal of education. We want our students to be able to actually do things after theyve engaged with us. But those things that students learn how to do are highly variable, context specic, and instructor specic. For instance, we could write a learning outcome about (i) a very specic skills, such as mastering the solution a fairly narrow type of problem, or (ii) a more general skill, such as applying a particular method to a wider class or problems, or (iii) a very high level skill, such as being a better student. If fact, we all dene and reinforce these explicit (say, problem solving) and implicit (say, being a better student) outcomes in each course we teach or in each experiential environment in which we operate. So dening excellence in teaching necessarily requires a very broad denition of what students and teachers do when they engage with each other. Obviously teachers convey disciplinary content, in my case engineering mechanics, and they integrate the vast library of available information on the subject into a tight corpus of content that students study and, hopefully, master. In this sense, teachers are the wise masters of the discipline who see the entire landscape and wisely lead students along a particular path. Teachers play the role of knowledge gatekeeper. My denition of excellence varies quite a bit from this traditional sage-on-the-stage model. Within the social constructivist framework, I view teachers as facilitators, who convene conversations among students, drive those discussions in a particular direction, and

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ultimately (hopefully) lead students to experience that moment of individual discovery that personalizes learning in such a powerful way. When students learn by doing (an experiential principle), in concert with their peers, led by an expert whose role is to facilitate discovery, that is when teaching is excellent. This is not simply my denition of excellence; rather, a wide body of literature on active learning, student peer-teaching and collaboration, and the facilitator role of teachers solidies this view as a concrete pillar on which an educational philosophy can be built. 3.1. Teaching as Skillset Development. Years ago, it was common to think of teaching and learning in the context of what students know or understand. Today, we speak in terms of what students can do. This subtle shift in rhetoric further emphasizes the evolution from learning-as-listening to learning-as-doing. My goal in any learning environment is to enable the learner to be able to do something useful at the end of the learning experience. While watching me do something can be helpful, the research clearly shows that guided exercises, facilitated by a skilled instructor, with increasing diculty and gradually decreasing scaolding10 are a valuable way to help students master specic skills. Part of this skillset development necessarily involves the teacher modeling the desired outcome. Teachers must demonstrate the attributes we wish to see in students. We must model good communication, clear purpose, attention to detail. We must explain our thought process, in addition to a solution procedure. We must be open to constructive criticism and aware of the intellectual capital present in the classroom. We must convey high expectations and uphold high standards. Later in the document I share some specic examples of me doing exactly this. 3.2. Teaching as Human Subjects Research. If you have ever done any human subjects research, you know that showing teaching eectiveness, demonstrating successful learning, or proving excellence seems to be a formidable and perhaps even unquantiable task. How do we measure learning? How do we measure student engagement? It sometimes seems hopeless, especially compared to more scientic research which tends to be somewhat more quantiable and sometimes employs indicators that are more directly measurable. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, puts it this way when speaking of social sector organizations11: To throw up your hands and say, But we cannot measure performance in the social sectors the way you can in a business is simply lack of discipline. All indicators are awed, whether qualitative or quantitative. Test scores are awed, mammograms are awed, crime rate data are awed, customer service data are awed, patient-outcome data are awed. What matters
a temporary instructional support that provides the student just enough structure so that s/he can successfully learn a new concept or skill; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructional scaolding 11from pp. 7-8 of Good to Great and the Social Sector (A monograph to accompany Good to Great), Jim Collins:Boulder Colorado, 2005
10scaolding:

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is not nding the perfect indicator, but settling upon a consistent and intelligent method of assessing your output results, and then tracking your trajectory with rigor. Human subjects research, as I have learned during the past six years of my research collaborations with faculty in the Curry School, relies upon creating a case, built from various pieces of evidence collected via dierent modalities, that substantially validates the hypothesis put forth. In human subjects research, the inter-subject variability related to the richness and diversity of human beings means that there is almost never a smoking gun that denitively proves or disproves anything. Moreover, condent conclusions can generally only be precipitated out of large-sample-size data sets with mixed-methods approaches. Mixed-methods approaches are dened by data collection that spans several dierent modalities. For instance, we can collect objective, quantiable data, such as the number of hits on a website, or the number of comments posted on a blog. We can also collect subjective, quantiable data, such as responses to surveys in which respondents self-report data (such as the number of hours they spend studying) or provide their opinion on something (using a Likert-type scale). We can also collect subjective, qualitative data, such as observations of subjects engaging in a task, or structured interviews with subjects about their experience during the study. Any one piece of data from any one of these modalities, by itself, probably does not tell a very persuasive story about the research. It is the combination of these data which, in the aggregate, reveals something about the hypothesis being tested. Human subjects research arguments are generally constructed using multiple data types coalesced in creative ways to support a research argument. 3.3. Recognizing Excellence. Given the complicated nature of teaching and learning, it can be quite dicult to recognize excellence. I can think of a variety of proxies for excellence, listed in Table 1 and including a checklist to indicate whether I meet those measures of excellence. Many of these are the usual measures of teaching eectiveness cited widely by academicians in all disciplines. Many of them have an element, or even a primacy, of peer review. Some of them involve quantitative data, while others are based upon reputation. Some of them reect achievements in a single course, while others reect a longer-term commitmenteven a career-long commitmentto excellence in teaching. Many involve scholarly works, and some are related to pedagogical innovations. But perhaps you have noticed that none of these measures of excellence has any direct, explicit connection to actual learning. These measures generally capture actions that a teacher does, rather than outcomes that a learner achieves. In fact, none of these measures is in any direct way linked to what we should care about most: student learning outcomes. I can condently say that by using best practices from the literature (and developing my own best practices), my students achieve better outcomes than if I did not use such best practices. But none of these measures quanties what a student can do, how well they can do it, how long they remember how to do it, how they internalize how they do it, how they

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Meets? no yes consistently earns excellent student/teaching evaluations  earns teaching awards at department, school, university levels  earns statewide (SCHEV) award for teaching  invited to speak at regional events on teaching  invited to speak at national events on teaching  funded by NSF for education research  recognized as an innovator in educational methods for STEM  consistently invited to participate locally with TRC and other on-Grounds  teaching-related activities hosts workshops on pedagogy locally, regionally, and nationally  actively participates in the community of scholars on pedagogy and teaching  uses best practices from the STEM education community in constructing  learning experiences develops best practices for the STEM education community and disseminates  them widely inducted into the inaugural class of the University Academy of Teachers  (organized by the TRC) Table 1. Measures of Excellence in Teaching.

Excellence Measure

apply this skill to similar (or dierent) situations, or any of a host of other key learning outcomes. This is not necessarily a failing of our educational enterpriseas I mentioned earlier: education is a teaching/learning duality. And we must acknowledge that evaluation of learning outcomes is deeply challenging, requires expertise that we might not possess, resources that we cannot devote, and time that we do not prioritize. Perhaps, in general, the best we can do is celebrate great teaching, identify it when we see it, and use the proxies in Table 1 and others to evaluate it. In fact, Ken Bain (who visited UVa some years ago at the invitation of the TRC) has published the celebrated What the Best College Teachers Do, a seminal book that summarizes years of experience and research into what makes good teaching. His broad conclusions, the result of observations of and interviews with renowned teachers, as well as the synthesis of a vast literature, essentially reect four basic tenets of great teaching (in addition to the basic requirement of being a subject matter expert); great teachers: (1) View preparation as a scholarly endeavor. Preparing to teach requires the same seriousness as research, in that we rely upon the literature to guide our activities and approach, engage in constant self-evaluation and solicitation of useful feedback, are willing to change, adapt, and evolve, and focus specically on the outcome to be achieved (i.e., we are learner-centered instead of instructor-centered).

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(2) Expect students to be committed, and treat them with respect. Great teachers convey high expectations to their students, but always treat them with respect and basic decency. We set out clear expectations for students and encourage their intellectual development. We expect students to construct knowledge rather than simply receive it. (3) Create an optimal environment for learning. The best teachers engage students in a variety of learning experiences that require students to think in dierent ways, interface with their peers, and challenge their implicit assumptions and biases about the material. We create both in-class and out-of-class activities that encourage students to reect and discuss, debate and even argue, but above all else unleash critical thinking skills on disciplinary problems. (4) Evaluate their students and themselves. The best teachers give prompt, detailed feedback to their students, and continuously monitor the situation within the class to ensure students are making progress toward their goals. We constantly ask questions about our approach and pedagogy, about whether there are better alternatives to our current practices, and about our success in engaging all students in the learning. Bain generally acknowledges the challenges associated with measuring learning outcomes, but provides persuasive evidence that indeed the practices of good teaching correlate strongly with independent evidence of good learning. 4. My Teaching Evolution, Initiatives, and Personal Excellence Throughout my career, I have always endeavored to be a serious teacher; that is, one who engages teaching with vigor and energy, uses the literature and his own scholarship to its best advantage, and is not afraid to relinquish some measure of his own control in order to empower students to assume greater control of their own learning. In this section, I briey detail my evolution as a teacher and several key initiatives that illustrate my credentials as an excellent teacher. 4.1. The Evolution of a Teacher. Like most faculty, I had precious little experience in the classroom when I began my rst academic job at the University of Cincinnati at the age of 26. But what I did have is this: inspiring mentors from my PhD study and energy to emulate their success. At that point, I had very little knowledge of the education literature, and thrived on simple intuition and my role models from Purdue. Early on, my best credential as a teacher was that I could empathize with students, could put myself in their place. After all, I was only a few years older than they were, and it seemed very natural to think back to my own education, emulate the positive elements, and eliminate the negative ones. But this rst approach to teachingalthough successful by the conventional measuresdid not last long. My rst tear-down and rebuild of my teaching approach was about to happen as a result of technology. Toward the end of the 1990s, I quickly embraced a number of educational technologies and worked to leverage them in the classroom. This idea of technology-mediated learning has remained with me since that time, and although the technologies have changed, my

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commitment to using them constructively and to their best purpose has not. I was an early adopter of presentation technologies such as Powerpoint and Keynote, and used them creatively to engage students in the material and with each other. I was an early adopted of technology in general, including the iPod12. Applications such as Working Model and other basic physics engines allowed visualization of engineering problems in new ways, and could now be shared as networked solutions like Blackboard came online. This commitment, combined with my energy, creativity, and time, resulted in strong teaching successes as measured by the usual indicators. My teaching evaluations were uniformly strong, students appreciated my engagement with them, and in general I was viewed as progressive if not innovative in my approach to teaching. This period culminated with several teaching awards from my department and college at Cincinnati, as well as kudos from my peers. But new opportunities were awaiting as new technologies matured; the second overhaul of my teaching was about to happen. 4.2. The Game Changes. Shortly thereafter, in 2005, I moved to UVa and rented a house in the Forest Lakes neighborhood while my current house was being built. If you have ever navigated Rt. 29 N during rush hour, you understand the frustration of trac and the somewhat bleak oerings on local radio. However, around this time a new form of portable media emerged: the podcast. It took just a few days of listening to news and entertainment podcasts in the car on the way home from work to spark the idea of using podcasts for asynchronous education, ipping the classroom, and leveraging the anytime-anywhere nature of this new portable media for education. But this was an entirely new forum for learning. There were no rules, authoring tools were relatively primitive, distribution mechanisms existed but were cumbersome to say the least, the market (among students) for such resources was unknown and highly uncertain, and most importantly there was no pedagogy built up around this new tool. Nobody knew much of anything about how to use this new medium for education. In 2006, when I rst began using podcasts for teaching, only one thing was certain: this trend was going to revolutionize education, and somebody needed to gure outquicklythe best practices associated with using these tools for education. Today, we recognize that podcasts belong to the broader class of tools we lump together as social media, because they connect people around topics and interests shared by the group. They empower groups to create and share information quickly and in a platform-independent way. They enable collaboration, asynchronous sharing, and productivity anytime-anywhere. In 2006, many (most?) people dismissed these tools as toys for entertainment. To me, these sounded like technology-mediated social constructivism. These were tools for learning. 4.3. The HigherEd 2.0 Project. Based upon my experience using social media tools experimentally in my classes (back then, these tools were typically called web 2.0 tools), I wroteon a bit of a whima CCLI proposal to NSF requesting funds for the HigherEd
12the one that looked like a white brick and had a 5 GB spinning hard drive inside it

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2.0 (HED 2.0) project13. The core idea was that these tools were going to radically change education by empowering students and faculty to create and share all manner of information, multimedia, and learning resources. I assembled a team of colleagues from three other institutions, and I proposed a multi-year, multi-university eort to deploy web 2.0 tools in our engineering mechanics classrooms, evaluate the results, and ultimately develop best practices for use of these tools. The HigherEd 2.0 project, funded by NSF in 2007, included: creation of hundreds of multimedia learning resources (mostly lecture and problem videos), all shared with students formalization of a framework for using a course blog (instead of a typical course management system) for course administration andmost importantlyfor student communication development and execution of evaluation plans that collect data on usage, student performance, student attitudes, and a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data (in conjunction with collaborators in the Curry School of Education) exposure of well over 2,000 students at four institutions to web 2.0 tools for learning and the HED 2.0 pedagogy a video series that I authored as a supplement to the Pearson Hibbeler series of engineering mechanics texts (about 250 videos in all); these videos form the backbone of Pearsons online learning resources for students and are integrated into their MasteringEngineering platform (distribution worldwide is about 50,000 units per year) a variety of conference and journal publications, as well as a book chapter, disseminating best practices from the research Through this work, we have evolved the pedagogy around social media for learning in higher education, and engineering education in particular. While technology by its very nature is ephemeral, this work has focused on the two most-likely-to-endure social media elements: blogging and video. These two technologies are mature, their authoring tools are powerful and easy to use, and they will be useful, even pervasive, forms of social media for the foreseeable future. While many other research questions can be asked about new forms of social media (how do we use Twitter? should I have my students check in using foursquare?), these two technologies form the cornerstone of a maturing body of literature and the foundation of my expertise. The HED 2.0 project was a success in many dimensions. (1) It enabled me to improve my teaching. The HED 2.0 project and the related technology truly gave voice to my social constructivist leanings and enabled me to realize my ambitions for constructivist learning. Social media tools are powerful mediators of learning when deployed the right way, and when integrated into the fabric of a course. One of the great lessons of the HED 2.0 program is that using technology as an add-on is far less eective than fully buying into an integrated system for technology-mediated learning.
13see also the project website

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(2) We established best practices. The culmination of the program is the recent book chapter14 detailing the main ndings of the work. The best practices for blogging and video production contained therein are the result of careful research that relied upon mixed-methods data collection including interviews with students. These best practices are, of course, built upon the literature and inspired by scholarship in information design, multimedia learning, pedagogy, and some very specic features in the literature such as the worked-example eect15. (3) I was rst. To my knowledge, the HED 2.0 program was the rst formal eort funded by NSF to examine social media as a tool for learning. There has been much interest and research since we started, of course, but it seems clear that I was rst to successfully propose a formal research program to examine these issues and develop best practices. This is useful because it establishes me as an innovator in this space, and has enabled networking among other researchers in related areas via invitations to conferences and other events. (4) We developed a great deal of experience doing human subjects research. Doing mixedmethods research in a classroom setting, not a more strictly controlled environment, presented formidable challenges but also great opportunities. My team learned a tremendous amount about human subjects research in engineering education that we can carry forward into new research projects. Within the rst year of using blogs and podcasts and multimedia for my teaching, I earned the All-University Teaching Award. This was followed closely by the SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching with Technology. And subsequently, I receive media coverage in the Chronicle and elsewhere for the innovative work I was doing. Also, based upon this program, I have been invited to speak at various conferences, convened multiple workshops at dierent universities, and participated in the rst two NAE FOEE (Frontiers of Engineering Education) events in 2009 and 2010. 4.4. The Engineering Genome Project. One key liability of the HED 2.0 project, one that only became visible after a high-level review of all the multimedia content I had created, was the lack of an organizational backbone for the multimedia content itself. I was the only person who truly knew how the content was organized, how it was stored, and how to access it. I had inadvertently become the information gatekeeper that I had decried all those years ago! If students wanted to access these materials, I had to give it them. My teaching narrative takes another turn at this point, this time inspired by Pandora, the online music service. In particular, Pandoras Music Genome Project seeks to categorize music according to hundreds of specic genes (i.e. attributes), thus allowing listeners to see and understand connections between two pieces of music that on the surface appear to be very dierent and entirely unrelated. It is worth taking a moment to use the Pandora service, search on your favorite band or genre, and listen to the playlist Pandora produces. You will likely be surprised by some of the connections Pandora makes for you.
14included in my dossier and available online 15see also Sweller, J., The Worked-Example Eect and Human Cognition, Learning and Instruction,

16(2):165-169, 2006.

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Now imagine that we could do the same thing with multimedia learning materials. Students in a calculus class could search on a topicsay, innite seriesand immediately be presented with a series of multimedia learning assets that cover all angles of innite series. Some multimedia les might show derivations from a calculus class. Other might show application examples in Fourier series analysis. Others yet might show very distant and esoteric applications of innite series, perhaps a complicated Harmonic Balance solution. Nonetheless all these multimedia examples are related to each other through the underlying genes that characterize what an innite series is. This is the essence of the The Engineering Genome Project. It makes explicit all the connections among seemingly disparate pieces of content that experts know and understand, yet are usually invisible to novice learners. The genes that describe the underlying structure of the information are the keys to unlocking these relationships for learners. The Genome will have built into it the usual social features we have come to take for granted in the past few years, including the Amazon-like students who watched this video also watched..., or you might also like... The Engineering Genome Project, funded by NSF in late 2011, gives me the opportunity to develop a potentially transformative tool for categorizing engineering knowledge in the service of student learning. Once the Genome reaches its full maturity, I expect it to induce another change in my teaching strategy. Empowering students to actively search for and manage their learning resources raises the commitment to a social constructivist framework. It demands that students take more ownership of their learning by requiring them to actively make choices about what materials to access, when, how often, and where. Students can share these materials via the built-in social features, tag them using language that makes sense to them, save playlists of particularly useful resources, and generally take more control over their learning. 5. Advising and Mentoring 5.1. Undergraduate Students. Given my current position, and my long-standing commitment to undergraduate education, I have vast and long experience in advising and mentoring undergraduate students. This includes experiences in undergraduate research, course advising, guidance on graduation school selection and application, and many other forms of mentorship. Of particular interest is my experience with students who are struggling for one reason or another. I refer you to my Service Narrative for a fuller description of what my position of Associate Dean entails in this regard, the commitment I have demonstrated to this form of teaching, and the successes I have achieved. 5.2. Graduate Students. I have supervised four PhD students and many MS students, with three of the four PhD students earning their degrees based upon research in my core area of mechanics of jointed structures and interfaces. The fourth PhD student earned his degree based upon biomechanics-inspired work and AFM experimentation. In all cases, my mentorship of these students has been positive and productive; all are gainfully employed in various research and development organizations focusing largely in the automotive and aerospace areas. All earned their degrees in timely ways, and each developed a marketable

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EDWARD BERGER

and valuable skill set consistent with their goals and ambitions. Please see my Research Narrative for a fuller description of my research areas and how these students participated in my research programs. 5.3. Junior Faculty. I have mentored two junior faculty over the past ten years. While at Cincinnati, I provided guidance and mentoring to a faculty member hired in 2001, so for our four years of overlap at Cincinnati I was an informal mentor to this person (who eventually earned tenure and is still on the faculty at Cincinnati). My department at Cincinnati had no formal mentoring program, but I believe quite strongly that I played a positive role in his development as a faculty member. I am currently, through my association with the University Academy of Teachers, mentoring Patrick Hopkins from the MAE Department in his development as a teacher. This formal mentoring program pairs veteran, well-established teachers with recent hires/junior colleagues with the goal of technology transfer from one to the other. Of course, the mentor clearly benets from the ideas of the mentee, and vice versa. The point of the program is to formalize a mechanism for great teachers to train the next generation of UVa faculty for more than teaching success. Rather, the goal is to institute a culture of commitment to teaching, and to innovation in teaching, within our junior ranks especially, and therefore ensure UVas identity as an institution that takes teaching serious for many years to come. 6. Summary My teaching philosophy and actions are deeply rooted in the scholarship of teaching, both the scholarship I leverage and the scholarship I create. Research on engineering education is beginning to take its rightful position next to technical research as a critical and valued endeavor for academicians and teachers. The existence of several Departments of Engineering Education (Purdue, Virginia Tech) legitimizes this area of research and scholarship in indisputable ways. NSFs investment in engineering education research, along with the continued rise of ASEE and allied scholarly outlets, further fuels critical examination of this area. And in fact, operating our education programs more like we operate our research programs (using a scientic method) should be our ultimate goal. Running our curriculum open-loop or with weak, ABET-inspired feedback just is not good enough for professionals committed to continuous improvement and excellence in our mission. I embody excellence in teaching in myriad ways, but two stand out. First, my commitment to engineering education as an active and funded research endeavor conveys a seriousness of thought and action to my students, my colleagues, and myself. By prioritizing this research activity, and leveraging it to improve the undergraduate experience, I serve as a role model for others who believe, as I do, that our brand as an Engineering school is built on our high-quality undergraduate programs. Second, my commitment to the specic framework of social constructivism conveys a trust in my students and a deep belief in the intellectual capital aggregated in my class. When students accept the responsibility for their own education, share their gifts with each other, and participate in a community of learners, student satisfaction rises and deeper learning is possible.