Senior Lecturer Awarded Two Fellowships
One fellowship is through the Affordable Course Materials Summer Fellows Program, sponsored by University Libraries. The program, according to its website, “offers Baylor faculty the opportunity to re-evaluate their course materials with an eye toward replacing required course materials with low- to zero-cost materials, such as open educational resources or OERs, in order to reduce the per-class costs for our students.”
Tankersley’s proposal was centered around one of his department’s most in-demand courses. Writing for Media Markets, which is cross-listed as a class in both Journalism, Public Relations & New Media as well as Film & Digital Media, is populated mostly by students who are business majors. The department offers approximately 15 sections of the course each semester, and all the sections fill quickly when registration opens. Tankersley’s proposal was to bring together material from all the faculty who teach the class and make it available to current and incoming faculty members – including adjuncts new to the department – so that they’re all teaching from similar sources, and to eliminate the need for a textbook. The current edition of the book used most frequently in 3372 is priced at $125.
For Tankersley’s other proposal, through University Libraries’ Digital Preservation Services, he’ll work with material in the Black Gospel Music Preservation Program.
Each fall semester, Tankersley teaches a section of Introduction to Mass Communication as a New Student Experience Class, which means enrollment is limited to students who are new to Baylor, mostly students in their first semester of college. The goal of the fellowship is to incorporate some of the music into his lectures on the history of American music.
Tankersley is in his 16th year of teaching in the department, and was recently elected to the Faculty Senate, a three-year term which will begin this fall.