The Graduate School is pleased to announce that Amanda Shaw was awarded Honorable Mention for the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS) Excellence in Teaching Award at the master’s level. Shaw was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award at Michigan Tech in the spring of 2014.
One of her most notable accomplishments as an instructor has been redesigning how Introduction to Astronomy is taught on campus and online. In the classroom, she utilizes many active learning techniques, including astronomy playing cards, manual clicker cards, in-class projects and mini-lectures. Shaw adopts a similar format online, involving students in mini-lectures created with Camtasia and embedded with rich video content from NASA and quizzes. She plans to publish a paper comparing and contrasting the student learning outcomes in the on campus and online version of the identical course.
Shaw was nominated by Ravi Pandey (Physics) and is advised by Alexander Kostinski (Physics). She is pursuing a Masters in Physics.