Zicklin Faculty Honored for Innovative Teaching
February 1, 2024It is a truism that business schools cannot rely on yesterday’s pedagogy if they want today’s business students to become tomorrow’s business leaders. Last year, to encourage continuous improvement in Zicklin classrooms, the Zicklin Excellence and Innovation in Teaching Awards were launched.
Dr. Basak
This year’s winners were recently announced. In alphabetical order, they are Assistant Professor Ecem Basak, PhD, of the Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics, Professor Kapil Bawa, PhD, of the Allen G. Aaronson Department of Marketing and International Business, and Professor Nizan Geslevich Packin, SJD, of the Department of Law. A fourth faculty member, Assistant Professor Youngdeok Hwang, PhD, of the Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics, received an honorable mention.
The winners each received a $5,000 honorarium, and the honorable mention awardee received $2,000.
Dr. Basak was honored for her work in her Big Data Technologies course, which familiarizes students with cloud technologies such as Amazon Web Services. Basak also offers relevant experiential learning opportunities through class projects that draw from big data sets such as streaming finance data and New York City data on real-time responses to fire emergencies.
Dr. Bawa
Dr. Bawa was recognized for his overhaul of the Marketing Information for Decision Making class, which is required for marketing majors. He introduced open educational resources so that students would pay no costs for educational materials, added elements that help scholars improve their presentation skills, and developed ways to encourage better teaming.
Dr. Packin
Prof. Packin “has been at the forefront of creative and student-centered innovations in teaching,” noted Valerie Watnick, JD, chair of the Department of Law. These include encouraging students to use ChatGPT, provided they also indicate what their prompts were and any changes and edits they made to the ChatGPT-generated content. Packin also assigns episodes of the futuristic Netflix show “Black Mirror,” as an engaging way to teach about tech ethics and policy as well as privacy and cybersecurity issues.
Dr. Hwang
Dr. Hwang received an honorable mention for his work on an introductory course in statistical engineering, in which he shifted the focus from theory to practice, creating hands-on assignments so that students could build data science portfolios. Students were required to share their work on the code hosting platform GitHub, which encouraged collaboration while simultaneously helping them to showcase their work to potential employers.
All four faculty honorees were nominated by the chairs of their departments, with the nominations evaluated by a committee of representatives from the Zicklin faculty, the Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning, Zicklin undergraduate programs, and Zicklin graduate curricula.