Ben Pryor, professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy, is working to help combine technological advancements and the classroom into a full learning experience for students at UT through his new position as assistant vice provost of Learning Ventures.
According to Main Campus Provost Rosemary Haggett, Pryor was chosen out of five candidates who applied for the position.
“We had five excellent candidates and I’d like to thank all the other candidates who were interested in the position for their interest. I asked them all to continue to be faculty leaders in their respected roles, but [Pryor] had the best fit for the position,” Haggett said in her address to the Faculty Senate Tuesday.
Pryor said he feels his past experience and dedication made him the best candidate for the job.
“I went through a competitive process and I know there were some fine people who applied for the job, and I put everything on the table,” he said. “On the basis of my past work, on the basis of my commitments, on the basis of my philosophical work, I think that was why I was selected.”
According to Haggett, Learning Ventures’ goal is to provide a richer learning environment for students and to “give [technology] skills to continue learning through life.”
Haggett also said that Learning Ventures is the combination of several previous initiatives; instructional designers, distance learning and the Center for Teaching and Learning.
“Learning Ventures is going to foster the use of technology in the classroom, computer-assisted learning and academic innovation; basically we’re looking to develop more enriched learning environments,” Haggett said. “There’s always the next new technology and we have not changed teaching and learning as fast as the world has evolved.”
Pryor said his main responsibilities will be to connect online learning and the use of technology in the classroom.
“Right now my primary responsibility is to transform what in the past we understood as two separate things at UT. One is online learning and the technologies associated with learning,” he said. “But what we’re recognizing is that we can and must blend these things. I prefer to call it connective education; and that is what I want to say is the best of both worlds.”
According to Haggett, Pryor will be working with all faculty members to find “innovative approaches to online and classroom learning.”
“So that’s my job, it’s working with campus leadership, to really come up with the best ideas for undergraduate learning, because that’s the focus; it’s shifting the focus from teaching to undergraduate learning, and teaching is a really important part of that,” Pryor said.
One issue Pryor said he hopes to address is keeping an open line of communication between administrators and faculty members.
“The irony aside, there’s a tendency I think to distrust the administration,” he said. “But we’re at a point in our educational history, not only at UT but I think higher education generally, where we can’t afford that. We can’t afford to erect a barrier between the administration and the faculty.”
Pryor said the solution is to be open to new ideas and suggestions no matter what the title of the person who suggested it is.
“I want to listen to the part-time instructor, the lecturer, the visiting assistant professor, the full time, tenure track faculty member, the tenured faculty member, the provosts, the president, the deans of the colleges. All these people have to be listened to. If it’s a good idea, I don’t care where it came from, let’s talk about it,” he said.
Pryor said he has been interested in advancing education since the beginning of his college career.
“I’ve been involved, for a number of years, in committees and thinking with others about university education in a forward thinking way, and so I just started taking a greater interest in this. By greater, I mean my first course was Philosophy of Education,” he said. “The reason why I took the position is because I saw a lot of ideas coming from the administration that, though at first I understood but distrusted, I’ve come to see is compatible with a way of going about education that I’ve been committed to since I was 18-years-old.”
Pryor said he hopes Learning Ventures will help students receive a full education in less time through the use of online courses and intensive summer programs.
“There are so many other things we can do, like shorten the time to get a degree with really good intensive summer programs and maximize the use of online education; a student could get out in three years, with previous college credit, take that down to two years and still get a full rich University of Toledo education,” he said.
Pryor said he was inspired by people in Massachusetts who are working to find ways to efficiently distribute aid for survivors in Haiti.
“I bet you no class told them how to get together with friends in a café in Cambridge and help people in Haiti. But I bet you a class did teach them how to use Epsilen, the Web, how to scrape data from Twitter feeds in order to isolate patterns; I bet you a class did that and they took that knowledge and brought it into their community and made it better,” he said. “That’s one really good reason why we need to ramp up technologies in our face-to-face classrooms, and online.”
Pryor said he will hold his position until he “crashes and burns.”
“I serve at the pleasure of the provost, which means I have to demonstrate that we’ve gone a long way down the road of institutional change,” he said.
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