Saving Students Money (and Improving Their Education) Earns UC Professor Statehouse Honor

A cost savings of 96 percent would garner attention in any segment of the higher education process. The innovative work that the University of Cincinnati’s Richard Harknett engineered to produce such a result earned him statewide recognition Tuesday from the Ohio Board of Regents and the Ohio General Assembly.

Harknett was one of 11 educators from around the state honored at the Ohio Statehouse with the Board of Regents’ “Faculty Innovator Award,” which recognizes professors who have incorporated digital teaching materials into their courses that both enrich learning and reduce textbook costs for students.

This is the second year for the award. UC’s Mark Thomas, a professor of Computer Science at Raymond Walters College, was a recipient last year of the award.

Projects that Harknett incorporated in two core classes for students in international relations helped earn him a spot among this year’s award winners. He developed a “webbook”  and an online role-playing exercise for his introductory international relations course. For the next international relations course in the sequence that the students would take, Harknett continues to use those tools but also added, in place of a textbook, a hyperlinked syllabus populated by academic papers available to the students at no cost through UC’s electronic journal database.

The cost-savings for students, according to Harknett, were merely a secondary benefit of his attempts to take his teaching forward in interesting new directions. “I was doing this for pedagogical reasons that had the side benefits of students not having to pay huge costs,” he says.

Read the Ohio Board of Regents' release on the awards.

Typical textbook costs associated with those two courses are about $250, so for students to be able to take both courses with material fees at just $10 is a substantial savings.

Harknett’s path towards developing the electronic tools he uses in his classes began back in 1995, when he was a participant in UC’s first Summer Institute for Instructional Technology. He laughs when he recalls, “I remember being introduced to this new thing called Netscape.”

Harknett used the training experience to start down the road towards developing his online tool for teaching international relations, “Lenses of Analyses: A Visual Framework for the Study of International Relations.” The project gives students a non-linear approach to international relations by providing differing viewpoints, or “lenses,” from which to view historical case studies. Being able to actively illustrate this point by teaching it through the Web introduces to students a key aspect of what they are studying – choice of lens affects the variables that come into focus, and thus the ultimate explanations students will develop for why international relations flow as they do.

He has also developed a second electronic tool that he uses in teaching both of his first two courses in international relations, an original case study called

“The Fate of Melos.”

Through UC’s Classics Library, he researched an actual event from the Peloponnesian Wars, the conquering of the island of Melos by the armies of Athens. For the case study, Harknett constructed positions that would have likely been taken by both the Melian authorities and the Athenian authorities as they approached this confrontation. Students then adopt a role from one side or the other and through the exercise learn vividly about the tension found in international relations between morality and power.

In meeting the challenges of technology advancing, Harknett hopes to begin revisiting his work on the “The Fate of Melos” in the coming months, with a goal of updating the exercise so that it can be presented in a digital 3D environment more in line with the digital experience levels of the college students of 2010.

A third effort for which Harknett was also recognized was his development of the hyperlinked syllabus for his second international relations class in the sequence. As opposed to working from several texts as often happens in teaching this kind of course, Harknett’s students are asked to access directly through electronic journal resources the source material for important exposure to the full research experience in the field. It involves more work to maintain and keep current, but it also gives students who take the class more of a real-world approach to studying what really takes place in the field.

 Harknett and the other educators honored this year were recognized in a ceremony at the Ohio Board of Regents offices involving Ohio First Lady Frances Strickland and Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut, and then were honored with proclamations on the floor of the Ohio Senate.

Having two faculty members recognized from all those around the state in the first two years of the Faculty Innovator Awards speaks to the kind of commitment UC faculty make towards creating a challenging and progressive learning environment, believes Wayne Hall, UC’s vice provost for Faculty Development.

Says Hall: “With Mark Thomas’ award for introducing digital course materials last year and now Rich Harknett’s this year, UC is underscoring the value of a powerful classroom combination: more affordable textbooks used for more innovative pedagogies. It’s certainly a combination that our students very much appreciate and benefit from.”