Teaching and Learning Initiatives

 

During Academic year 2012-2013, Dr. Penprase was an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow at Yale University, and visited the centers for online learning to study online learning as part of his fellowship. Dr. Penprase has written an article on visits to online learning centers based on the ACE fellowship, which was helped the discussion about online learning within the Yale University Administration.  During 2013-14 at Pomona College, Dr. Penprase 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, he served as the founding co-director of the new Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning (LACOL). This consortium joins 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 and co-organized by Dr. Penprase. During 2014-15, he began his work at the Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where he chaired a sub-committee exploring online and technology-enhanced teaching at Yale-NUS College.

While at Yale-NUS, he began a book that was provisionally titles “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, Dr. Penprase was researching 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 the book:

In 2015, Dr. Penprase was named as the founding Director of the Yale-NUS Centre for Teaching and Learning. In that capacity he has 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 activities, programming and resources for the center are on the Yale-NUS CTL web site. During academic year 2015-16, Dr. Penprase 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, Dr. Penprase 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, Dr. Penprase accepted the position as Dean of Faculty at Soka University of America, a leading liberal arts university in Aliso Viejo, CA. In this position, he was responsible for managing the academic undergraduate program, has worked with faculty and staff to develop a new Life Sciences concentration, which will be opened with a new science building, a new curriculum and several new faculty in Fall 2020. This project has been very exciting, and he is now working as Vice President for Sponsored Research and External Academic Relations. In this new role he works on strategic projects for Soka University and also seeking institutional grants from private and government foundations.  In April 2020 his 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/