November 2015

Archived Content

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Salute to Faculty Excellence 2015

 Recognizing our outstanding faculty is a year-round activity at UNT, but each fall we set aside a week especially for this happy task: Salute to Faculty Excellence. This year, the event culminated with a dinner and awards ceremony on October 2, 2015 at Apogee Stadium. To learn about this year’s awardees, click here. Photographs from this celebration can be viewed here.

Call for Faculty Awards Announced

In recognition of faculty excellence, the UNT Foundation, the Office of the Provost and the Office for Faculty Success are pleased to announce the call for the 2016 faculty awards. Please consider nominating your colleagues for one of the awards listed below. Nomination packets are due February 1, 2016.

UNT Foundation Eminent Faculty Award
UNT Foundation Faculty Leadership Award
UNT Foundation Community Engagement Award
UNT Foundation Outstanding Lecturer Award
Ulys and Vera Knight Faculty Mentor Award
University Distinguished Research Professorship
University Distinguished Teaching Professorship

Faculty Focus

Iftekhar AhmedIftekhar Ahmed, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, is an emerging expert in the area of virtual research environments (VREs).

Since arriving at UNT in 2012, Professor Ahmed has received two National Science Foundation Grants totaling $400,000.

The first involved the use of traditional interviews as well as “big data” to study existing VREs and to develop typologies describing how VREs work.

The second got underway last year and will continue for another four years. This study will be more concerned with studying how VREs are implemented and how the models developed under the initial grant can be applied in different academic disciplines.

Professor Ahmed’s work has already yielded scholarly publications and he expects these projects to generate several more in the coming years.

Janice Hauge, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, is known nationally and internationally for her work in industrial organization, regulation, and telecommunications.

She currently chairs the TPRC Conference, an annual event in Washington, D.C. that brings together academics, leaders from industry, and policy-makers from the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and other agencies to discuss the latest research and trends in industry and regulation. It is the leading conference of its sort in the nation. Professor Hauge reports that many of her publications originated as presentations at the TPRC, and that she has benefitted from the comments of some of the best minds in her field.

One of the several projects Professor Hauge has ongoing involves analyzing the popular television reality show, Shark Tank. This project is allowing Professor Hauge to test the strategic behavior theories of pre-emption and attrition. While these are standard parts of industrial organization textbooks, relatively little recent research has been done to test these theories empirically.

Professor Hauge is bringing insights from this research into her classrooms where she also excels, having won numerous UNT and national teaching awards.

 Lecturers on the Move

Raina JoinesRaina Joines is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and the faculty advisor for The North Texas Review, UNT’s student literary magazine. For the last two years, Professor Joines has led the Creative Writing Roundtable at UNT, an inter-institutional workshop group of poets funded by UNT’s Mentoring Grant program. Last year, she also coordinated the English Department Lecturers mentoring group, which featured a series to showcase creative projects by lecturers in the English department. This past summer, Professor Joines was awarded a month-long residential fellowship at the Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondack Mountains in New York. She wrote poems and presented her work in the community of other writers and visual artists.

Most recently, she was selected to participate in the Letterpress Printing and Fine Press Publishing Seminar for Emerging Writers at The Center for Book Arts in New York City.  In this seminar, she will learn the basics of letterpress printing and work with other participants to create broadsides of poems and collaborate on new projects.

 

Leadership Opportunities

The Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs is seeking applications, nominations, and/or suggestions of full-time tenured faculty members interested in a Spring 2016 semester administrative internship, which may be extended further based upon support available and mutual agreement. This development program is designed to offer faculty members opportunities to explore career options in academic administration. The nomination deadline is December 1, 2015. Click here for the Call for Nominations.

Student Perceptions of Teaching

SPOT logoStudent Perceptions of Teaching (SPOT) is the new student evaluation system for UNT.  Developed and offered by the University of Washington (IASystem®), this proven system offers both online and paper administration options, as well as evaluation forms that support different pedagogical formats (e.g., large lecture, online, studio). This system also offers many benefits for obtaining an overall assessment of the course and instructor.

This semester, SPOT opens on November 9th and closes on November 22nd. Please encourage your students to participate in this important exercise. For more information, please visit the SPOT website

Dollar SignNeed Help Identifying, Securing, and Managing External Funding Sources?

UNT’s Office of Grants and Contract Administration is ready to help you identify, secure, and manage sources of external research funding. Identifying potential funding sources has never been easier through the COS Pivot system. OGCA also will help with every stage in this important process, including proposal development, preparation, and submission, post-award accounting, and much more. To learn more about these resources and opportunities, click here.

 Mentoring is a vital part of a successful academic career. Certainly, a key component of mentoring involves a traditional relationship between an early-career faculty member and a more experienced senior colleague. However, recent literature indicates that a broader and more flexible approach to mentoring may be especially helpful.

At UNT, we are keenly interested in developing a culture of mentoring excellence in all areas affecting faculty. For example, each new faculty member is assigned a traditional mentor from within his or her area as well as being placed in an external mentoring group. This group will be composed of about ten other new faculty members and three mentors from a wide variety of disciplines. This, we hope, will foster networking and cross-disciplinary sharing of ideas and contribute to a successful launch of each new faculty member’s UNT career. To learn more about faculty mentoring programs, click here, or contact the Office for Faculty Success.

NCFDD: An Exciting New Resource for UNT Faculty

 UNT faculty and graduate students are now able to participate in the online programming offered by the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD). The NCFDD is an external mentoring community, and is designed to help faculty and graduate students enhance their productivity in research and writing and to improve work-life balance. For some details about this exciting resource and for instructions about registering, click here. Look for more details about NCFDD early in the Spring 2016 semester. 

 Faculty: The Greek Life Office Needs Your Help!

The Greek Life Office would like to know how many of UNT’s faculty are members of Greek organizations. If you are, please take a moment to complete a simple survey by clicking here.
If you have questions about this survey or about Greek life at UNT in general, please contact Jason Biggs at greeklife.unt.edu.

Teaching Corner logoTeaching Resources for Engaged Educators (TREE)

Are you interested in maximizing your impact on student learning? Would you like to connect with other committed educators? Are you looking for ways to document your efforts to improve your teaching? If so, the Teaching Resources for Engaged Educators (TREE) initiative, developed by CLEAR, is for you. TREE leverages online training modules focused on 10 important teaching proficiencies (e.g., engaged learning, assessment, course design) that allow you to move at your own pace through three levels of proficiency (introductory, intermediate, and advanced). The TREE program will appear in your list of Blackboard courses and is available for everyone who teaches at UNT. To participate, simply select the course and then the modules you would like to complete. You will receive badges for completing each module and a Certificate of Teaching Distinction when successfully completing all three levels of a proficiency. 

UNT's New Faculty Information System is Here!

The Faculty Profile System (FPS) has been used by UNT since 2008. Although this system satisfies state regulatory requirements, it is limited in its reporting capabilities and in terms of queries for finding faculty and their research interests and publications. Academic departments have found it difficult to create customized reports. The antiquated FPS is also less compatible with modern browsers; and faculty and students have found the system to be cumbersome.

In 2014, UNT began seeking a more robust solution for publicizing its faculty. The new Faculty Information System (FIS) will replace all current profile systems to provide a more robust solution for publicizing our faculty. The current FPS will go off-line at 5 p.m. Wednesday, October 28, 2015 in preparation for the implementation of the new Faculty Information System (FIS). During this system transition, login access will be disabled to migrate the existing data. Faculty members’ profiles, however, will remain visible to the public. UNT has imported much of the data from the FPS into the new FIS database. However, differences in the two systems mean that not all data can be imported into the new system in the same format or fields. Data that could not be imported directly into fields was placed in “legacy” screens.

Beginning January 4, 2016, faculty members can update their profiles and upload course syllabi. UNT’s Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness and the Office of the Provost are launching the improved system and plan to distribute detailed instructions when the system goes live at the beginning of the year. If you have any questions, please contact faculty.info@unt.edu.

 

Important Dates

November 9, 12:00 a.m.

Fall 2015 Instructor SPOT Evaluations Open

November 22, 11:59 p.m.

Fall 2015 Instructor SPOT Evaluations Close

December 3, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m., Gateway Ballroom

Faculty/Staff Holiday Party

December 3, 8:00 p.m., Winspear Performance Hall

Sounds of the Holidays: A Choral Celebration