Head of the Class
Assistant Professor Brad Love was honored recently with the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award for the 2013-2014 academic year at The University of Texas at Austin.
Love, who has taught in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations in the Moody College of Communication since 2007, was recognized for great teaching of undergraduates in the core curriculum along with seven other faculty members on the Forty Acres from the College of Liberal Arts, College of Natural Sciences, and the School of Social Work.
"Your commitment and outstanding performance, as well as your high academic standards, instruct and inspire," wrote President William Powers Jr. in a letter to Love. “This award recognizes the consistent level of excellence that you have achieved teaching undergraduates in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations.”
This academic year, Love’s class load includes a writing-focused course for first-semester students, a capstone course for advertising and public relations undergraduates, a graduate course in persuasion and human decision-making, a public health and society course, and a new course on developing entrepreneurship and innovation skills.
Love said he structures his core curriculum to encourage personal development including soft skills and focuses on creating a scaffold of assignments to move students up a hierarchy of higher-order thinking.
His future plans include implementing more compelling methods to use digital resources for online learning.
“The challenge of building substantial interaction online is an essential one for the future so that digitally based education can benefit from social learning the way that in-class learning does,” said Love. “Students learn so much from each other, and we need more effective ways to continue employing that asset online—it's an exciting early stage made all the more so by UT's institutional commitment to online education.”
The awards are based upon selections received from deans and department chairs and are reviewed by the vice provost, who then makes recommendations to the executive vice president and provost.
Winners are rewarded for educational innovation with a $5,000 honorarium and are invited to attend a special ceremony this spring.
