Last of a series
By Rick Vacek | October 9, 2024
Dr. Carol Cirulli Lanham would need to review decades of international travel to figure out how many countries she has visited.
“I’ve lost count,” said the associate director of the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). “It’s a lot.”
That multitude of experiences is only part of the reason why she is so excited about managing Virtual Exchange/Collaborative Online International Learning (VE/COIL), which uses technology to unite University of Texas at Dallas faculty and students with their peers around the globe.
Cirulli Lanham already has helped arrange 50 partnerships with 29 universities in 17 countries during the program’s four years. “I truly feel like a matchmaker,” she said.
The other CTL associate director, Dr. Salena Brody, is equally enthusiastic about her Short-term Working Group (SWG) program, in which faculty invite a small group of students to join them and complete a project in four in-person sessions.
“This initiative has brought new faces into CTL,” Brody said. “Faculty see the dual benefits of working collaboratively with students and being part of a faculty community on campus. We are reaching a mix of faculty – some who are regulars in CTL programming and several new faces.”
The further expansion of the SWGs was made possible by a $20,000 grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, which supports biomedical research and education in the U.S.
The success of the SWGs was chronicled earlier this year in this package of stories:
The most avid SWG enthusiast is Dr. Ben Porter, associate professor of instruction in bioengineering. He loves exchanging teaching ideas with Brody, a professor of psychology.
“The faculty SWG community provides a space to learn what others are doing to connect with students,” Brody said. “You meet faculty from every school. I don’t know whether I would have been swapping teaching ideas with a bioengineering professor without this community.”
Now this bioengineering professor finds so much value in the SWGs that he signed up to do two more in the Fall 2024 semester.
For many higher education administrators and instructors, the pandemic is a time to forget. But for Cirulli Lanham, it was career-changing.
“Because of Covid, my online expertise proved incredibly valuable,” she said. “Not only was I able to assist my colleagues who needed help gearing up to teach online, but I also discovered this new online pedagogy that has opened so many doors for me and others.”
She trained for a year with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), developing the expertise that made VE/COIL possible. Each participating UT Dallas faculty member is paired with a professor in another country so that their students can work together on a project that might span a few weeks to an entire semester. Their students meet online, exchange ideas and complete projects that are graded by their respective instructors.
More than 2,300 UT Dallas students and their international peers have benefited from those experiences, but they never would have gotten the opportunity if Cirulli Lanham hadn’t been such an effective matchmaker. The list of liaisons, which she displays on a large whiteboard and on the CTL website, is a world-class lesson in persistence.
Many of the partnerships involve the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (EPPS) and the Naveen Jindal School of Management (JSOM) faculty, which makes sense. EPPS and JSOM students probably will spend much of their careers working with overseas interests – they might as well start now.
There’s the partnership between Dr. Irina Panovska, associate professor of economics in EPPS, and the University of Marburg in Germany, which helped raise awareness of the dual degree master’s program in International Political Economy.
The connection doesn’t end there. Dr. Maria Hasenhuttl, clinical assistant professor of management in JSOM, is working with a different Marburg professor.
Dr. Victoria McCrady, assistant professor of instruction in organizations, strategy and international management, teaches business communications in conjunction with the University of Monterrey, Mexico. “I gave her my most magnificent partner – a Texan who’s living in Monterrey,” Cirulli Lanham said. “I’m really optimistic about their collaboration.”
Dr. Muhammad Rahman, associate professor of instruction of geospatial information sciences, has taught in the Middle East. “So I got the next best thing, which is northern Africa … Algeria,” Cirulli Lanham said.
But maybe her most impressive geographical trick was finding a partner for Dr. Clint Peinhardt, professor of political science, public policy and political economy. He’s going to be a pioneer in working with a Ukrainian university.
Obviously, that one creates logistical challenges requiring extreme flexibility.
“We’re going to have to do that one asynchronous,” she said.
Cirulli Lanham also has been doing a lot of work in another important area – artificial intelligence (AI). She has been presenting workshops and webinars on the subject since the Spring 2023 semester and continues to be amazed by the large turnouts.
“I don’t think we’ve ever gotten numbers like that,” she said.
The CTL was chosen to participate in AAC&U’s Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum, which began in September. It also purchased about 50 copies of the book the institute is based on and will launch faculty-led reading groups this fall. It has proved so popular, more than 50 faculty are involved – some acquired the book on their own.
Dr. Karen Huxtable-Jester, the CTL director, is organizing a Generative AI webinar series with University of Texas System educational developers – directors and other members of CTL leadership on the eight academic campuses. Each campus (or two) will present on the second Thursday of each month. Registration is open.
Still more AI content will be provided thanks to another new CTL program. Three Provost’s Teaching Fellows were selected to assist in the planning and presenting of CTL programming for a term of at least one year with a possible renewal of two additional years.
One of the first three Teaching Fellows – Dr. Sarah Moore MA’07 PhD’17 of JSOM – has been studying AI extensively. The others are Dr. En Li and xtine burrough, both of the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology.
Educators across the country no doubt would agree that those AI sessions are sorely needed. Best practices can’t be shared until practical, effective solutions emerge.
That’s why the CTL is so essential. Good direction for students starts with good direction for faculty.
That means all faculty. The original director, Dr. Paul F. Diehl, couldn’t have foreseen the breakout importance of AI when the CTL was initiated at UT Dallas, but he did have an eye on one particular concept.
“He had a set idea in mind of different levels of need,” Huxtable-Jester said.
Those levels extend through the variety of offerings – such as VE/COIL and the SWGs. Cirulli Lanham and Brody were hired by Diehl at the same time about six years ago, and here they are today, teaming with Huxtable-Jester to help CTL thrive.
“Who could have ever guessed that we could each come up with parallel programs – different, but complementary?” Cirulli Lanham said. “Then we would both win the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, and then we would both be inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and now we both teach abroad.
“I guess that’s a testament to Paul Diehl. He saw something long before everything that we have today.”
Less than a decade into its work, many things can be said about the Center for Teaching and Learning’s reach across the UT Dallas academic spectrum. But one stands out.
It’s a lot.
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Also in this series:
CTL’s ‘Pedagogical Magic’ Shares Tricks of Good Teaching
CTL Workshops Offer Neighborly Advice to Faculty