Surprised and satisfied is how Dr. Kyle Horne, assistant professor in mechanical engineering, described his reaction when he found out he received the 2019 University of Wisconsin-Platteville Early Career Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence. The award is designed to honor university faculty who hold tenure-track appointments and have completed between two and five years of teaching.
“I did work very hard on the application and so it was satisfying to be selected after that hard work,” said Horne. “You apply for so many different things that it’s always a pleasant surprise when you get one of them.”
Horne, who is entering his fourth year at UW-Platteville, took the initiative to re-evaluate the class Thermal Systems Laboratory, a course he previously taught. “No one asked me to do this for this class; no one requested it,” he said. “I chose of my own volition to do this because I wanted the materials to be better quality than when I was teaching it.”
“I found as I was teaching the course, students sometimes struggled to understand what was expected of them,” said Horne. “I created more than 200 pages of documentation for students to use. It has been adopted by the other faculty, and students have been pleased with the change.”
Horne is now working on re-designing the coursework for the class Intro to Computational Methods. “I’ve been given a great opportunity to explore and make recommendations which will then be considered by my colleagues and the college for pretty significant changes to the class,” he said.
The process of creating new coursework involves a lot of effort, but it’s also exciting according to Horne. “My principal responsibility here is to educate my students,” he said. “There’s a lot of support effort that has to be done to make sure the instruction can happen, but everything I do is to support the learning of my students.”
Horne will be recognized at the university’s convocation in August with the other university awards recipients.