New Teaching Innovation Awards from QS and the Wharton School of Business

QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publisher of the QS World University Rankings, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, are launching a new global competition to highlight teaching innovation in higher education.

Named “Wharton-QS Stars Awards 2014 – Reimagine Education”, the competition offers an opportunity to celebrate innovative teaching ideas in higher education around the world, spanning e-learning, blended and classroom-based learning. All higher education institutions are eligible to enter, regardless of location, institution type, ethos and structure.

Jerry Wind, Lauder Professor & Director of the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management at the Wharton School, says this is the perfect time to highlight new teaching ideas and celebrate teaching innovation in higher education. “With the dramatic changes in behavioral patterns of empowered, skeptical young people, combined with innovative technologies in e-learning, we have to ask if the traditional models of teaching are still applicable.”

Celebrating innovative teaching in higher education

Wind adds, “The time has come to reimagine higher education and to reinvent pedagogical approaches. The purpose of our collaboration with QS, the world’s leading university rankings organization, is to leverage the wisdom of informed experts in education – to identify innovation in e-learning and blended learning to enhance the experiences of students around the world and to help produce future leaders in every field of study.”

Submissions should give details of a pedagogical experiment that has demonstrable results, as well as an analysis of how the project could be developed and scaled out to other institutions. Awards will be given across three categories, to highlight the most innovative teaching approaches in presence learning, e-learning, and combined presence and e-learning.

If outstanding projects emerge, additional awards may be given in discipline-specific categories: natural sciences, engineering and technology, social sciences (including management), arts and humanities, life sciences and medicine, and professional and executive education. The deadline for submissions is 31, August 2014, and full details are available here.

Contributing to the spread of great teaching ideas

Entries will be assessed by an independent panel of judges comprising multidisciplinary e-learning and traditional learning experts around the world, and the winning examples of teaching innovation will be showcased at a three-day conference in Philadelphia, to be held 8-10 December 2014. An e-book of winning entries will also be published in February 2015, alongside the release of the annual QS World University Rankings by Subject.

The overall winning entry for innovative teaching will also have the opportunity to nominate a student to receive a QS Scholarship worth US$10,000, while category winners will be able to nominate a student to receive an internship either at the Wharton School’s SEI Center or in one of QS’s international offices.

Nunzio Quacquarelli, Managing Director of QS, says he hopes the awards will help to spread new teaching ideas and share insights into what constitutes high-quality teaching innovation in higher education. “QS is partnering with the SEI Center to launch the 'Wharton-QS Stars Awards 2014 – Reimagine Education' in order to identify faculty genuinely involved in ground-breaking innovation in teaching. We hope the innovations highlighted by these inaugural awards will be of huge benefit to the next generation of learners.”