2010 Award Judges
Judges for the 2010 award are:
Ken Bain
Vice Provost for Instruction/Professor of History
Director Research Academy for University Learning
Montclair State University
Montclair, New Jersey, USA
Ken Bain is Vice Provost for Learning, Director of the Research Academy for University Learning, and Professor of History at Montclair University in Montclair, New Jersey. Bain received his PhD in 1976 from the University of Texas at Austin. He has been the founding director of four major teaching and learning centers: the Center for Teaching Excellence at New York University, the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, and the Research Academy for University Learning at Montclair.
Dr. Bain is internationally recognized for his insights into teaching and learning and for a fifteen-year study of what the best educators do. He has presented workshops or lectures at over three hundred universities and events, in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. His learning research has concentrated on a wide range of issues, including deep and sustained learning and the creation of natural critical learning environments.
Dr. Bain has won four major teaching awards, including a teacher-of-the-year award, a faculty nomination for the Minnie Piper Foundation Award for outstanding college teacher in Texas in 1980 and 1981, and Honors Professor of the Year Awards in 1985 and 1986. A 1990 national publication named him one of the best teachers in the United States.
Dr. Angela T. Ragusa
School of Humanities & Social Sciences
Charles Sturt University
Wagga Wagga, Australia
Angela Ragusa is a senior lecturer in sociology at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia. She earned her MS in Science and Technology Studies and a PhD in Sociology from Virginia Tech University. She was born and raised in New York City and prior to academia worked for the United Nations, investment banks and law firms.
Dr. Ragusa has taught sociology, psychology and politics in American and Australian universities since 1997. She has received two (2007, 2010) research fellowships from the Institute for Land, Water & Society (ILWS) as well as special study leave and is a member of the ILWS senior management committee.
Her research interests include social change, political sociology, and technology & distance education, especially how online learning can be used to benefit rural learners. She has a forthcoming book: Interaction in Communication Technologies and Virtual
Learning Environments: Human Factors.
Karen Swan
Distinquished Professor of Ed Leadership
University of Illinois Springfield
Springfield, Illinois, USA
Karen Swan is the James J. Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Illinois Springfield. Prior to that she was the lead researcher at the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service (COLRS) at Kent State University.
Dr. Swan’s research has been focused mainly in the area of media and learning, and her current research focuses on online learning, data literacy, and ubiquitous computing. She is particularly known for her research into the effectiveness of online teaching and learning, and for her work on communities of inquiry as it relates to online education.
Dr. Swan has published over 70 journal articles and book chapters as well as two books and several multimedia applications on educational media and technology topics. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals, on the program committees for three educational technology conferences, and currently chairs the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning. She is the recipient of the coveted Sloan-C award for Most Outstanding Contribution
to Online Learning by an individual.
James Zimmerman
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Montclair State University
Montclair, New Jersey, USA
James Zimmerman is the Associate Director of the Research Academy on University Learning and Associate Professor of Chemistry at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.
During the past decade, Dr. Zimmerman has participated in professional development activities at the local, national, and international level. These activitieshave included developing a Teaching Fellowship program that supports faculty interested in SoTL studies, the mentoring of university and college faculty team projects designed to improve science and mathematics education with an emphasis on addressing issues that often discourage women and minorities from
pursuing study in the sciences or mathematics, and presenting the NSF-sponsored Multi-Initiative Dissemination (MID) project curriculum to cohorts of science faculty from a wide-range of academic institutions.
Dr. Zimmerman has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in general, nuclear, and physical chemistry and has won several university awards for his teaching. His scholarly agenda has included experimental nuclear chemistry, integrative learning theory, and more traditional chemistry education research.
