History Instructor Honored with Teaching With Sakai Innovation Award
by Jacqueline Mai
Last year, the Sakai Teaching and Learning Community established the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) to recognize instructors making exceptional use of Sakai, an open-source software project upon which CourseWork is based.
This year, the winners for the second annual award were announced at the 10th Sakai Conference in Boston. Dr. Edith Sheffer from Stanford, was awarded second place for her course, Germany and the World Wars, 1870-1990. The first-place award winner was Dr. Andrea Crampton from Charles Sturt University in Australia for her course Introduction to Forensic Science. Honorable mentions were given to Dr. Mark Van Dyke, Marist College (USA), and Ms. Cherry Stewart, University of New England (Australia).
Dr. Sheffer impressed the judging committee for her creative use of the Sakai Wiki tool as a means for students to develop their own historical characters in the context of real historical events. Dr. Sheffer and the other winning instructors used Sakai to shift away from passive teacher-centered learning towards a more active student-centered pedagogical approach.
The first and second place winners presented during the Sakai Conference. Their recorded presentations can be found at http://vimeo.com/tag:twsia0.
A recent interview with Dr. Sheffer on her use of the Sakai Wiki tool is also featured on the Teaching with CourseWork Web site.
