n o t e s&NEWS Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology
Volume 7, Issue 2 • October 2005
Celebrating Ten Years of Success at CTLT Director Dr. Dan Madigan to Leave CTLT
Dr. Dan Madigan, Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology since 1996, will be leaving his current position for a new position as Provost Associate in the Office of the Provost. The Provost’s Associate program is designed to provide tenure-system faculty members with administrative experience and to enhance faculty understanding of the operation of the Office of the Provost. Although Dr. Madigan will be involved in a variety of projects in his new job, his primary focus will be in the areas of curriculum reform, course assessment planning, and the integration of engagement activities into course design. Dr. Madigan’s experiences in faculty development and notably in the area of teaching and learning will complement other team members from the Office of the Provost. Dan will draw on his experiences to assist the Provost and his team in supporting an innovative learning environment for students, faculty and staff based on the BGSU Academic Plan. He will begin his new duties in January 2006. During Dr. Madigan’s tenure at the Center, he developed the current iteration of faculty learning communities in which 110 faculty are now participating in 10 learning communities. During the past four years, over 300 faculty have participated in faculty learning communities that were both topic based and cohort based. Every Friday, over 1800 faculty, graduate students and administrators read Dr. Madigan’s Teaching Tips, launched three years ago, across campus.
As Director of CTLT, he has also taken a primary leadership role in supporting the seamless integration of technology into the areas of teaching and learning. His office launched WebCT, BGSU’s first content management system, and supported faculty using it and its replacement Blackboard until just recently.
Under Dr. Dan Madigan’s leadership, CTLT grew from just a few hundred clients in 1996 to over 2,000 clients for each of the past several years. Most recently, Dr. Madigan has introduced threaded workshops in which participants are enrolled in a series of pedagogical workshops over the period of a semester. This kind of workshop environment allows a group of faculty a chance to share ideas over time, rather than for just one independent workshop. Under Dr. Madigan’s leadership, CTLT grew from just a few hundred clients in 1996 to over 2,000 clients for each of the past several years.
Integrated Course Design Workshop Series Introducing a New Workshop for Faculty Members
In most recent years, faculty have been introduced to a growing body of new literature (e.g., Bransford’s How People Learn, Zull’s The Art of Changing the Brain, Donovan and Bransford’s How People Learn in Science...) on student learning that has both complemented past work on how students learn, and has shed new light on how people learn. Emboldened with such knowledge, faculty at BGSU have begun to look for opportunities that are transforming they way they teach.
Dr. Madigan participates in a workshop with some of BGSU’s faculty members.
staf f MEMBER Jeff Wax is a doctoral student in Theatre that is new to CTLT this semester. In the ‘off-season’ he makes his home in Portland, Maine. At the center, Jeff ’s primary duties include: • Consulting BGSU faculty teaching pedagogy courses. • Work with the graduate student teaching community at large.
Armed with such knowledge, CTLT has launched a series of workshops called “Integrated Course Design.” This threaded workshop, (see more at www.bgsu.edu/ctlt) has drawn over 50 faculty since it was first launched in the fall of 2004. Facilitators Dan Madigan and Steve Langendorfer have designed this series of 1.5 hour workshops to support faculty who want to ...Continued on Page 2
jeff wax
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