Gitner Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology: Past Awardees

2024 Gitner Award Winner

Bobak Nazer, of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

Electrical & Computer Engineering Associate Professor Bobak Nazer (left) receives the 2024 Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology from University Provost ad interim Kenneth Lutchen. (Photo by Mike Spencer)

In a field as rigorous and continually evolving as engineering, Associate Professor Bobak Nazer recognizes the importance of thorough, effective classroom support for students working with advanced concepts. To do so, he leans into blending innovative teaching styles and creative technological resources to establish lasting positive impacts. When confronted with challenges surrounding the Probability, Statistics, and Data Science for Engineers course, Professor Nazer tackled a complete transformation of the course with a novel, pedagogically supported pre-lecture video series and flipped classroom model.

Prior to Professor Nazer’s innovation, students across sections had drastically different course experiences. Recognizing that students and faculty lacked equitable access to quality learning materials and support, Professor Nazer implemented a flipped class model and created a 49-episode, pre-lecture video series for students across all sections. The videos use animated handwriting for text and illustrations to create visual engagement for students, while remaining concise with varying speed markers for concepts, definitions, and examples to maintain student attention. Recognizing how fast the videos move, Professor Nazer created accompanying PDF files and formula sheets to assist students with note taking for each concept. Each video’s production was intentional and iterative, taking up to 20 hours to create, and being re-worked following feedback from students in the courses. These new resources and altered course design were enthusiastically received, with one student sharing, “The videos are some of the best pieces of educational content I’ve seen.” 

The reach of Professor Nazer’s course transformation has extended far beyond the 1,500 BU students who have taken his course. Since making the videos available publicly, his series has been viewed over 120,000 times in over 50 countries and was recognized in 2022 with a feature in the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism Magazine.

2023 Renato Mancuso, of the Department of Computer Science
2022 Kathleen Vandenberg, of the Division of Rhetoric
2021 Binyomin Abrams, of the Department of Chemistry
2020 Abbas Attarwala, of the Department of Computer Science
2019 Rosina Georgiadis, of the Department of Chemistry
2018 Charles Merzbacher, of the Department of Film & Television
2017 Amber Navarre, of the Department of World Languages & Literatures
2016 Gerald Fine, of the Department of Mechanical Engineering
2015 Paul Blanchard, of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics
2014 Bennett Goldberg, Pankaj Mehta, Andrew Duffy and Manher Jariwala, of the Department of Physics

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