The Carleton Service Excellence Awards luncheon, where several Carleton faculty were recognized for their contributions to the university, was held in the Fenn Lounge on Feb. 26.
Carleton president Roseann Runte said awards are given every year to faculty members or a team who has worked together on an innovative project.
“There were over 170 nominations put forward by students and faculty,” Runte said.
The event was hosted to to acknowledge faculty’s individual acts of service and team-based projects that benefitted the community.
Suzanne Blanchard, vice-president (students and enrolment) said individual awards were handed out, as well as an innovative team award and a group award.
Blanchard said there were four individual award recipients, including Mark Valcour, a Carleton sound and radio technician who recently passed away.
Dragana Polovina-Vukovic, the acting assistant director of the Educational Development Centre, was part of the team that won the Service Excellence for Innovation award.
“After receiving the excellence award for a team effort I felt, and still feel, great because it is a nice way to recognize all members of the team who spent many hours together working on a new and exciting project,” Polovina-Vukovic said.
The project that earned Polovina-Vukovic and her fellow team members the award is Carleton’s Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, which she said was comprised of a number of psychology lectures.
“I worked closely with a team of instructors from the Department of Psychology and helped them create an online course, based on pedagogical best practices,” Polovina-Vukovic said.
Polovina-Vukovic worked on the online course design and project management for MOOC. She also had support from the Educational Development Centre and CUOL’s Media Production Services among other departments and services on campus.
She added faculty played a large role in the success of the process and the project.
“I really want to stress that the real heroes in this projects were all teachers from the Department of Psychology, who had this extraordinary vision about doing something different and new,” she said.
Other recipients included the team that worked behind the Course Leaf program, which is responsible for curriculum changes and producing a course calendar every year, according to Blanchard.
“That was a huge team and a three-year project, it seems easy but it was a very complicated project.” Blanchard said. “The staff really worked together and they delivered well.”
Polovina-Vukovic said she hopes the excellence awards ceremony will be stronger and with more nominations in the coming year.
“Carleton is a great place with many dedicated people,” she said.
