|
|
| |
I have extensive experience teaching college classes. My teaching portfolio includes the undergraduate course Business Programming (MIS 121) and an undergraduate core class (IS 323). After I joined Boston University (BU) in 2002, there was an initial two-and-half-year period of adjustment in both bridging the gap between the class subject and my domain expertise and trying to understand the peculiar requirements of BU students. My average teaching rating since Spring 2005 is 4.23/5 at Boston University. Before coming to BU, my overall instructor rating was 4.24/5 at the University of Arizona.
My teaching philosophy can be epitomized in two words: engaging and motivating. One class I have been teaching is the IS core class required of all undergraduate students in the business school at Boston University. This course, with multiple cross-discipline sessions, has been recognized in our department to be the most challenging undergraduate class to teach. It covers a wide range of IS concepts from very managerial to very technical. The material includes IT strategy, database, website design, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, ERP systems, supply chain management, customer relationship management, security, ethics, and IT investment. Teaching this class requires a strong background knowledge in every domain of the IS discipline. The students in this class often have a very diverse background. To most of the students, IS is a brand new concept and this is often their first IS class. But there are also a small number of students with a very strong technical background. These technically-savvy students often find the class less intriguing while the rest of the class may still have difficulty comprehending some of the technical concepts. Therefore, the most challenging task to an instructor is to keep the class content interesting to every student while helping them master it.
In the classroom, I have used several methods to engage students. I closely observe and constantly update myself about IT- related news and events occurring in the real world and associate these concrete real-life IS cases with class concepts that would be abstract, dry, and otherwise hard to understand. I have also designed a series of in-class activities to help students really understand difficult technical concepts such as Internet protocols and database management systems. These activities have been adopted by my colleagues teaching the same class for their effectiveness. The class evaluations have shown that my teaching method is effective and my class is valuable to students. Several students reported that they received job offers because of the knowledge and skills they learned in my class. One student who owns a company reported that he uses concepts learned in my class to manage the information in his company.
| |
|
Dr.
Bin Zhu