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Reflectıons on 30 Years of Teachıng: Old Dogs Can Learn New Trıcks

Tarih: 

Konum:  Ahmet Ersan Conference Hall

TED University Center for Teaching and Learning is inviting our academicians to the seminar entitled " Reflections on 30 Years of Teaching: Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks " by Prof. Dr. Erhan Erkut, MEF University.

Summary:

The traditional Central-European style of teaching (which goes back to church sermons) conflicts with how people learn.  If we want students to learn, then they should not be passive members of the audience listening to a preacher, but they must actively participate in the process.  The inferiority of lecture-based teaching has been exposed further during the last decade with the arrival of the Y Generation in the classrooms and the development of educational technologies.  Today’s students are even less willing to sit and listen than students 20 or 30 years ago (when today’s faculty members were students), and today’s technologies enable teachers to play their proper pedagogical role—namely an experience designer and a resource person, as opposed to a talking expert.   This seminar will feature experiences in the teaching of management science with student-centered learning and its variants such as active learning, collaborative learning, blended learning, and the flipped classroom.

Biography: 

Dr. Erhan Erkut has an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from Bogazici University (1980) and a PhD in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Florida (1986).  He taught from 1985 to 2005 in the University of Alberta School of Business, and served as a visiting faculty member at University of Geneve, Ohio State University, National Institute of Development Administration in Bangkok, and Bogazici (1992, 94, 96) and Sabanci (2003) Universities. He published over 60 papers in international journals mostly in the areas of facility location and transportation. He received nine teaching awards including the INFORMS Teaching of Management Science Practice Award and the 3M Teaching Fellowship, and five service awards from the Canadian Operational Research Society. While at the University of Alberta he established the Centre for Excellence in Operations and served as the Founding Editor of the INFORMS Transactions on Education. After his return to his native Turkey he served as Dean of Bilkent's Faculty of Business between 2005 and 2008, and the Founding Rector of Ozyegin University from 2008 to 2013.  Currently he serves as Vice Rector and Dean at MEF University.