Boilermaker Educator

Message from the Interim Dean

Greetings! This is the third edition of our e-magazine Boilermaker Educator. As with previous editions, this one is packed with stories about what makes our College great—what makes us ‘quinoa’ and not wheat! During my Interim Dean tenure, my first priority has always been to be the College’s biggest cheerleader—to tell our success stories far and wide. As you can see from the contents, this has been both pleasurable and easy—we have amazing faculty, staff, and students!

Here are just a few highlights:

• Amanda Case’s NSF grant to study after-school STEM learning at the Downtown Boxing Gym in Detroit. This story has gotten traction in media outlets across the U.S.
• Hua-Hua Chang was selected as a panelist at the University of Notre Dame’s “Trustworthy AI Lab for Education Summit”. Professor Chang is an award-winning and internationally recognized expert in Computer Adaptive Testing and other forms of AI.
• Anatoli Rapoport again hosted the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellowship with funding from the U.S. Department of State. Fifty-five students from 11 European nations and the U.S. examined the legacy of American democracy and discussed contemporary problems by exploring intercultural communication, freedom of expression, and media consumption and production.
• Wanju Huang is co-PI on a three-year grant (with the Purdue University School of Nursing) that seeks to integrate education about substance use disorders into Purdue’s graduate nursing curriculum to make education related to substance use more widely available. The funding will be used to update a current MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) and create a new MOOC designed to provide advanced practice nurses the knowledge to accurately assess and provide Opiod Use Disorder medication to individuals.

Finally, we received some very good news recently. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings listed Purdue University’s subject area of Education as #51 in the world for 2024 – a jump of 27 spots from the 2023 ranking (#78)! Purdue’s Education subject area ranked 21st among U.S. institutions, 14th among public universities with Colleges of Education, and was the highest-ranked Education subject area in Indiana. The College of Education is the primary college at Purdue University providing instruction in the Education subject area.

To find out even more about the wonderful things going on in the College, please follow us on social media (links at bottom)!

Boiler Up!

Phillip J. VanFossen
Interim Dean, College of Education