Assistant Professor Lokman Meho will receive the 2006 Trustees Teaching Award from the School of Library and Information Science. The annual award honors full-time faculty in each school of the university who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to student development. The main focus of the award is on classroom teaching, where Dr. Meho has excelled during the past year.
Dr. Meho has taught four different courses this past year, including two sections of the foundational L524 Information Sources and Services. All told, his five classes enrolled 138 students, reflecting his emphasis on and enjoyment of teaching foundational, high-enrollment courses where his skills as a teacher can make a difference. Dr. Meho intentionally uses a variety of teaching methods, including interactive lectures, demonstrations, case studies, student presentations, simulations, and problem-based and experiential learning. For each course, he engaged in extensive review, evaluation, and revision.
In addition, at the end of each semester, Dr. Meho encourages students whose class projects are particularly strong to consider reworking them for publication. At the end of 2005 two student projects had been published or accepted for publication and six others had been submitted to refereed journals (see related story - SLIS Student Project Published in Middle East Librarians Journal). This emphasis on connecting master's students with the literature of their field is especially valuable in a professional program.
This year he also advised SLIS Visiting Assistant Professor Ronald Day and SLIS doctoral student Peter Hook, who taught courses during 2005 that were developed from Dr. Meho's materials.
Colleagues note that Dr. Meho's door is always open; he has even arranged to meet and work with students completing online search projects on weekends. In course evaluations students consistently give Dr. Meho high marks for enthusiasm and availability. They comment on his willingness to seek them out in the library or laboratory to see how their work is progressing. This commitment to seeing education as part of the whole of life is also evident in his establishing an informal listserv for SLIS students to communicate about professional and social matters.
Dr. Meho also teaches L570 Online Information Retrieval, L625 Information in the Social Sciences, and L651 Evaluation of Library Sources and Services.
Posted February 21, 2006