Nominations open for 2018-19 seats to the Bloomington Professional Council
Nominations for the 2018-19 members of the Bloomington Professional Council will be accepted through April 13. The council has 21 members, and each year, at least seven positions are available for election.
Nominees must have been an IU Bloomington professional staff member for one year as of July 1, 2017. It’s also a good idea to receive manager/supervisor approval before being nominated/elected to the council as meetings do take place during regular business hours.
Need to know more? Over the past year, the Bloomington Professional Council has awarded professional development grants to deserving staff, advised the provost on issues such as gender equality, diversity advocacy and staff merit, and held forums and events for staff to get to know their campus, colleagues and departments.
Nominations should be sent to Jeremy Bennet at jebennet@indiana.edu. Staff members are welcome to self-nominate.
All staff members hired as of mid-April are eligible to vote in the election. Watch for an email with specific instructions on April 19. All votes must be cast by April 27, and new council members will be announced in early May.
Go on a ‘speed date’ with Learning Technologies
Join UITS Learning Technologies for lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. April 20 in Student Building 015 for “Speed Dating with Learning Technologies.” Faculty participants will have about 10 minutes to “speed date” – or learn about – a specific tool or service before moving to their next “date.”
Presenters will be from the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, eLearning Design and Services, the IUPUI Center for Teaching and Learning, IT Training and Collaboration Technologies. The event is designed to allow faculty to gain a quick overview of a specific technology and ask questions.
The event is open to faculty, associate instructors, graduate students and staff.
Featured learning technologies tools and services will include Pressbooks, Kaltura, Doceri, TopHat, Google at IU, IU eTexts, Zoom and more.
The deadline to register is Tuesday, April 17.
IU Bloomington’s Michael Hendryx named a Fulbright Distinguished Chair
Michael Hendryx, professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington, has spent his career researching environmental health disparities, particularly for people living in mining communities.
He will soon be expanding that work to Australia after being named a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Multiple Disciplines, the most prestigious appointment in the Fulbright Scholar Program. The research award is sponsored by the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, and only 40 awards are given each year.
As part of the award, Hendryx will spend five to six months in Australia in 2019, conducting research.
CEWiT celebrates success of student-alumnae mentorship program
IU’s Center for Excellence for Women in Technology celebrated the launch of over 100 mentoring relationships this term, a successful pilot for its new online-augmented mentorship initiative.
The program, which is part of CEWiT’s ongoing efforts to encourage, empower and advance women in technology, gave 150 female students access to alumnae mentors working in STEM fields. Mentors and mentees collectively logged over 680 conversations throughout the year, spending an estimated 806 hours talking with each other in person and via videochat, as well as text message and email.
IU Bloomington faculty internationally recognized for student success research
Over the past four years, more than 40 IU Bloomington faculty have taken part in learning analytics research projects to foster student retention, engagement and success on campus. IU faculty members were recognized at this year’s Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference in Sydney, Australia, for their contributions to the field.
IU Bloomington faculty’s work to further student success was featured in a paper titled “Implementation of a Learning Analytics Fellows Program,” which received the Best Practitioner Long Paper award from a review committee representing the Society for Learning Analytics Research, or SOLAR. The paper describes the process for establishing a program that has facilitated the work of the 42 Learning Analytics Fellows at IU Bloomington, who in collaboration with the Bloomington Assessment and Research Office have conducted scholarly research about teaching and learning, using learning analytics.
Overseas study official, journalism professor receive national honors
An IU administrator and an IU Bloomington faculty member have been honored by the Forum for Education Abroad for their contributions to study-abroad programs.
Kathleen Sideli, associate vice president for overseas study, received the Peter A. Wollitzer Advocacy Award for her work helping establish the forum as the collective voice of U.S. higher education abroad.
James Kelly, associate professor of journalism, and his Media School students received the Award for Excellence in Education Abroad Curriculum Design for “Reporting HIV/AIDS in Africa.” The summer class includes a four-week trip to Uganda, where students intern at the Daily Monitor, the country’s largest privately owned newspapers.
