Center for Teaching Excellence

One of the key resources for members of faculty and staff is the Center for Teaching Excellence, which provides a wide variety of services to members of the faculty and staff.

“We help professors find virtually anything they would want to know,” said Steve Richardson, the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence.

The center, primarily designed to help professors improve their teaching skills, goes to great lengths to monitor and help professors who desire or are believed to need its assistance. The center helps teachers “develop and polish their teaching technique” through several processes. The typical process begins with a consultation where the teacher is asked to describe his or her teaching style so consultants can understand and explain it better.

“We try to help teachers describe their own teaching styles,” Richardson said. “It helps shape the environment in which they teach.”

The center also looks at the past evaluations instructors have received from their department and students. The consultants then combine this information with their own observations of the instructor in the classroom and send the instructors into specific programs and workshops that meet their specific needs.

Another major purpose the Center serves is referral of faculty and staff members to other areas both on and off campus which can better accommodate their specific concerns.

The center has about 10 individual consultations and group programs serving 30 to 80 faculty and staff members each week. They also service all of the faculty through a monthly newsletter covering current questions and events.

The Media Resource Center

Another commonly used area by is the Media Resource Center, which provides faculty, staff and students with any of the specialized equipment needed to teach a class.

“We offer teachers over 100 different services in different areas to assist them in using technology in the classroom,” said Don Rieck, the director of the media resource center. “Our primary focus is to provide the faculty with the technology to help in the classroom.”

In order to fulfill this goal, the center provides not only the know-how to run the equipment, but it also provides the equipment itself. The center has a $4 million “army of equipment,” including a film library of more than 7,000 movies. The office contributes to the faculty effort by helping redesign the technological classroom and producing 150 new films each year.

“We are aimed at allowing faculty, staff and students to use our services to improve the quality of education,” Rieck said.

The graduate office

The graduate office targets graduate assistants by helping them deal with their specific questions and concerns.

The office works with the 2,300 students who teach, research and help as administrative assistants in order to teach them about the rights, responsibilities and privileges that come with their position, said Shelley Lott, student service specialist.

The department’s first concern is to deal with the academic concerns that these students face, Lott said. She said the office provides assistance with issues like scheduling and scholarship problems and offer seminars for teaching assistants.

A large portion of the advising deals with the benefits that come with the position. Lott said graduate assistants are generally considered to be students first and university employees second. This means that they do not generally receive special parking privileges and the availability of vacation time and sick leave varies by the position.

The department can advise the student on the special privileges that do come with the higher student employee position.

She also said that most of the graduate assistants know that they get their tuition rates reduced to resident tuition by meeting certain criteria. Most are not aware, however, that they can get the same rate for their spouse and get their tuition further reduced through scholarships based on the number of hours they work.