Over 30 years in the field of education, Dr. Yakut Gazi’s work has traveled the globe, from Turkey to Texas. her next home? Durham, North Carolina.
Gazi will begin the 2022-23 academic year as the first person to hold the position of Vice Chancellor of Learning Innovation and Digital Education, five months after Chancellor Sally Kornbruce announced her appointment. She leads her two major initiatives. Duke Learning Innovation When Duke Continuing Studies, He is also responsible for “developing and implementing educational innovation and digital education strategies, youth development programs, and providing continuing education and lifelong learning.” release.
The Chronicle spoke with her about her unique professional background, the difference between distance and digital education, and her first month on campus. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Chronicle: What are your roles and how do you feel about taking on that role in the first place?
Yakut Gazi: Learning Innovation and Continuing Studies are combined under my leadership. Continuing Studies includes pre-college programs, summer semesters, non-profit education, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a later activity that enables adults to continue learning and partner with Duke to have a community. consists of the activities of
This is a very interesting moment. Because at a university like Duke University, it’s great to have this position at the vice-chancellor level, and at the same time, it puts a lot of responsibility on my shoulders. Being number 1 gives you a lot of chances. We work with many people to jointly create structures and visions that are most meaningful to our students.
TCs: What do you see as the role of online learning in undergraduate education and continuing education programs?
YG: First of all, my role is not to promote online learning at the undergraduate level. I am passionate about the idea that digital education, when used deliberately and intelligently in the design of educational environments, can improve the educational outcomes and learning experiences of students.
Online education is a modality. Digital education is an approach to enhance the teaching and learning experience. Especially having gone through a pandemic, I see a lot of potential. We have all been exposed to the tools, challenges and opportunities of digital education.
Also, what we experienced during the pandemic was not online education. Online education is a purposeful approach to designing modalities that enhance learning. All we experienced was distance learning. Emergency distance learning.
Digital education as a continuum can really help students improve their learning and provide teachers with important tools. Digital education can be 1% or 100% for a given course. Let’s look at this as a continuum rather than making it an online versus home schooling debate.
The situation is completely different in continuing education, especially if we are talking about working adults. With the advent of technology and longer life spans, we need to create opportunities for working learners to easily return to school to upskill and reskill and then return to this workforce to repeat this.
Obviously people will have a hard time moving back to Durham if they have a job and a family. Online education, or 100% digital education, therefore has great potential to be a partner of choice for many working adults.
TCs: Although digital education is increasingly celebrated, it is still stigmatized, especially at the undergraduate level. How do you plan to recognize and address this bias in your new role?
YG: There are many studies showing that the two modalities, residential and online, are comparable. There are many studies showing that meaningful face-to-face teaching excels in hybrid scenarios with digital instruction, rather than simultaneously broadcasting what is happening in the classroom to the outside world. [both residential and online learning].
I think you need to take baby steps. We need to run some pilots that can produce high quality online courses at this institution and show that the results are comparable. I think we can.
TCs: What sparked your interest in this field of learning education and digital education? How long have you been working in these areas?
YG: In just a few days, I will be 30 years into my career…in the field of higher education. I was trained as a chemistry teacher. When I got my master’s degree, I was really going to be a science educator, but I realized that the field of education would be greatly affected by technology. and before the spread of the Internet.
So I started wanting to learn more about web-based teaching.go back to your home country [Turkey], there was no doctoral program in this kind of field. I moved to Spain and then to Texas. That’s why we started digging deeper into online and web-based instruction along with educational technology.
when I got my Ph.D. In the field of educational technology, my friends used to make fun of me. They said, “What is educational technology and why do we need a degree? Bring an overhead projector into the classroom and it becomes educational technology.”
TCs: It’s been a month since I came to campus. How was it to see the students come back?
YG: It was nice to see everyone’s excitement. When we first started, there weren’t many people, but more and more people gathered, and it really turned into a campus. It’s great to see the build up of energy.
I know it’s still my first few days here and I’m a little in love. But I feel this is what I’ve been looking for my entire career.
Send The Chronicle directly to your inbox
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can cancel anytime.
Anna Zolotor is Trinity Senior and Recruiting Chair for Volume 118 of The Chronicle. She was previously the news editor for Volume 117.
Comments
Post a Comment