APLU’s Academic Programs Section Announces 2020 Fall Winners of Biannual Innovative Teaching Awards

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ (APLU) Board on Agriculture Assembly’s Academic Programs Section today named winners of its 2020 Fall Innovative Teaching Awards. In their seventh year, the biannual awards are intended to bolster innovation in the post-secondary teaching of agriculture and related fields.

The awards program encourages new faculty to expand their scholarship of teaching and learning by creating projects with more senior faculty from their own or other institutions. Both levels of the awards, single institution and inter-institutional, encourage the adoption of innovative teaching and learning experiences for students. But the inter-institutional awards go further by encouraging institutional collaboration, expanding the impact of creative projects to more institutions and their students. Awardees share up to $5,000 per project to use on classroom aids, travel, or other project needs in the future.

“For junior faculty involved, this may be the first monetary award they receive, which, when combined with the mentoring by working with senior faculty on the project, boost their abilities as both a teacher and a researcher,” said Wendy Fink, APLU Director of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources and Executive Director of the Academic Programs Section.

The awards serve as a basis for continued innovation in agricultural education and as motivation to seek additional funding from other sources for continued innovation.

The full list of winners follows below:

Inter-institutional Awards

• EVOLVE: Evaluation of Virtual Online Learning through Varied Experiences
  Tiffany Rogers-Randolph, Kansas State University and Shannon Norris, New Mexico State University
• Innovating Virtual Connections in Educational Training Courses Using Experiential Learning and Human Centered Design
  Amy Leman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Rebecca Mott, University of Missouri
• Investigating the Impact of Open Annotated Bibliographies on Student Perception of Information Source Credibility
  Colby Moorberg, Kansas State University

Single Institution Awards

• Designing Equitable Immersive Experiences for Teaching
  Andrea Stevenson Won, Cornell University
• Facilitating Micropropagation Teaching by Using Augmented and Virtual Reality
  Wagner Vendrame, University of Florida