Murphy Award: Matthew Ohland
April 23, 2015
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Matthew Ohland, 2015 Murphy Award recipient and professor of engineering education. (Purdue University photo/Mark Simons) |
Five exceptional teachers have been selected as recipients of the 2015 Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in Memory of Charles B. Murphy. This week, Purdue Today will feature Q&As on each of the recipients. This Q&A focuses on Matthew Ohland, professor of engineering education.
Years at Purdue: 9
Teaching interests: For my entire career, I’ve taught classes in the first year of engineering. The specific topics have varied as the teaching teams I've been a part of have worked to balance multiple issues -- providing foundational experiences that will develop fundamental skills and habits, achieving specific learning objectives provided by our stakeholders, and managing the workload to be reasonable but representative of what students should expect in other engineering courses. I've had opportunities to teach other courses, and I think I would enjoy teaching some of the fundamental courses that tend to be a big challenge for students, such as Statics and Dynamics. There are graduate courses that would be fun to teach as well.
Goals as a professor: I have several goals as a professor. 1) To make sure that someone at Purdue is aware of the well-being of each of my students. This is frequently a team effort, and other students are one part of the team.
2) To identify and guide students to manage obstacles that get in the way of their learning. This might mean changing bad habits, talking about expectations with teammates, or seeing a counselor to get help balancing family, school and employment.
3) To communicate authentically with my students -- whether they exceed my expectations or fall short of them. This ranges from assuring a student that if her efforts to unite a struggling team are unsuccessful, her individual contributions will still be evaluated fairly to asking a student to turn his shirt inside out because the message on the shirt would make some students feel unwelcome. My career is full of such examples -- some hilarious, some heartwarming, some heart-wrenching and some disturbing.
What Ohland enjoys most about teaching: I enjoy most realizing that I’ve created a learning environment where my students can learn without me. Eventually, my students need to know how to learn without a professor’s help. That will certainly be important after they graduate. It may be important next semester if they take a class with a professor who isn’t a good fit for how they learn.
How Ohland's research on active and cooperative learning has influenced his teaching: My research on active and cooperative learning has helped me be comfortable sharing control of the classroom with the students. It helps me be flexible, adapt to what students are learning, thinking and feeling, and adjust to external conditions. In particular, my research on forming and managing student teams helps me create teams that have a good chance of succeeding and diagnosing team issues when they arise.
On what is needed in the classroom to promote success during a student's first year and beyond: Students who are accountable to each other for ensuring that all students have an opportunity and the support to learn.
On becoming a teacher: My father once told me that he became a teacher because he could be successful without having to lie. It turns out that I had a real gift for lying as a child, and it scared me where that might lead. That sounded like a great reason to become a teacher.
What his students say: Professor Ohland is a kind-spirited man who only wants the best from his students, who is always optimistic when some students seem to be veering from the right path and makes a point to individually reach out to them with motivation and assistance. His dedication to his classes, as well as the many organizations that he is a part of/ the head of is inspiring. If I could choose a motivating and inspiring Professor from Purdue who has personally impacted my life, I would choose Professor Ohland hands down. … As one of Professor Ohland's students last year, I could not have asked for a more interesting, caring, passionate teacher to begin my journey in Purdue Engineering. Having him as an ENGR 131 teacher, I did not know what to expect. Big, impersonal classes with cold, impersonal teachers were all I had heard about coming onto campus, but when I walked into Professor Ohland's class, I knew it would be much different.
