Teaching and Learning Initiatives

For over a decade, I have been actively developing new forms of Teaching and Learning from my positions at Pomona College, Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and Soka University of America.  During my sabbaticals at Yale University during the ACE fellowship and as a visiting scholar at Harvard and Stanford in 2023-24, I explored more recent developments in online learning and now the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence. A chronological history of these efforts in advancing teaching and learning is below.

During the Academic year 2012-2013, I was an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow at Yale University. This was the “Year of the MOOC,” and I was able to immerse myself in the rapidly developing world of online learning. This exploration included visiting the top online learning providers, including Coursera, EdX, HarvardX, and Udacity. These were all startup enterprises filled with exuberance and energy during this time.

I wrote an early article about our visits to these online learning centers during the ACE fellowship and also prepared a memo for Yale University, which helped inform discussions about online learning within the Yale University Administration.  During 2013-14 at Pomona College, I chaired the Pomona College Future Learning Technologies Committee and led the Pomona College faculty in a series of events discussing technology-enhanced learning and online learning in liberal arts Colleges.

In 2014, I was the founding co-director of the new Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning (LACOL). This consortium joined Pomona, Amherst, Carleton, Claremont Mckenna, Haverford, Swarthmore, Williams, and Vassar Colleges in a partnership to explore forms of online learning that are best for liberal arts colleges. The LACOL discussion from 2014 culminated in a conference at Pomona College in June 2014 hosted by Pomona College. During 2014-15, I began my work at the Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where I chaired a sub-committee exploring online and technology-enhanced teaching at Yale-NUS College.

While at Yale-NUS, I began a book provisionally titled “The New Age of STEM Teaching and Learning: How Active Learning, Online Technologies and Research Have Transformed STEM Education.” This book has been subsequently published with the title “STEM Education for the 21st Century” by Springer. As part of the project,  I researched some of the latest trends in Online learning, studying Teaching and Learning Centers, and STEM teaching and learning. Here are some of the early versions of chapters of the book:

In 2015, I was named as the founding Director of the Yale-NUS Centre for Teaching and Learning. In that capacity, I managed faculty development workshops, created a center for discussions of teaching and learning, and developed programs to share new perspectives on assessment, course design, and pedagogy with the Yale-NUS Faculty. The center’s activities, programming, and resources were published on the Yale-NUS CTL website and are available by request. During the academic year 2015-16, I chaired the Yale-NUS College Teaching, Learning, and Advising Committee and served as a member of the Presidential Task Force on Technology-Enhanced Teaching. In 2016, I was one of seven faculty inducted into the National University of Singapore Teaching Academy, which advises and consults on enhancing teaching and learning at NUS, and fosters innovation and scholarship in teaching and learning at the University.

In 2017, I accepted the position of Dean of Faculty at Soka University of America, a leading liberal arts university in Aliso Viejo, CA. In this position, I managed the academic undergraduate program. I worked with faculty and staff to develop a new Life Sciences concentration, which was opened with a new science building called Curie Hall, named after Marie Curie. Our team developed a new interdisciplinary Life Science curriculum featuring project-based learning,  and we hired six dynamic new STEM faculty members from 2018-2020 to offer the new curriculum.

This project has been very exciting, and I am now working as Vice President for Sponsored Research and External Academic Relations. In this new role, I am working on strategic projects for Soka University and am seeking institutional grants from private and government foundations. This work brought a $2-million matching grant to Soka University of America from the John Stauffer Trust to establish a summer research program in Chemistry and Biochemistry, which began in the summer of 2021.

In April 2020, my book on STEM Education for the 21st Century was published, and you can read more about that book in the blog post here:

http://bryanpenprase.org/stem-education-for-the-21st-century-book/