FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WISE Contact:
Kathleen Schisa
support@wiseeducation.org
www.wiseeducation.org

December 2008

WISE Recognizes Outstanding Faculty 

The Web-based Information Science Education Consortium (WISE) is proud to announce the recipients of the 2008 WISE Excellence in Online Education Awards. WISE is pleased to recognize seven highly regarded instructors for their outstanding dedication to best practices in online education this year.  

2008 Excellence in Online Education Award Recipients:

Linda Braun – Simmons College *
Ellen Detlefsen – University of Pittsburgh *
Shirley Giggey – University of British Columbia

Meredith Farkas – San Jose State University

Bernadette Callery – University of Pittsburgh
Terry Bennett – University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Mary Kay Biagini – University of Pittsburgh

* Denotes repeat recipient

Faculty selected for the award received nominations from one or more WISE students at an institution other than the instructor’s home institution, based on their instructional style in one or more WISE courses taught between Spring 2008 and Fall 2008.

“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 Syracuse University Associate Provost Bruce Kingma, who co-founded the 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 member institutions.”

The WISE Excellence in Online Education Awards were presented at the WISE pedagogical workshop at ALISE, Community in Online Learning: Preparing WISE Scholars. Award recipients have contributed their own ideas for best practices on topics like organization, communication, and use of multimedia formats.  These best practices were shared as part of the annual workshop, which took place on January 20, 2009 at the Grand Hyatt Denver. The session also included presentations and discussions on student communication technologies beyond the course management system, building learning communities, and preparing students for successful careers.

WISE was developed to provide faculty training for online pedagogy, establishing 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 15 LIS programs from participating colleges and universities around the world, and, as of December 2008 will have offered 333 online courses to over 550 students.  WISE pedagogical training caters to both faculty and doctoral students, and is available to WISE members and others in the LIS community who are interested in advancing their online instruction skills.