I'm Janet Rankin. I'm the Interim Director of the Teaching and Learning Lab here at MIT. And for the past four years, I've been teaching 595J. It has a lot of other numbers, but it's Teaching College-Level Science and Engineering.
Well, before I came to MIT, I was on the faculty at Brown University, and I taught in the engineering department there. And it was very interesting to me how you could either do a really good job teaching, or not so good a job teaching. So I started to get interested in some of the theory and some of the best practices associated with teaching specifically to engineering, but teaching in general. And I worked in the Teaching and Learning Center at Brown for a while.
And so when there was the opportunity to come here and work at MIT in the Teaching and Learning Lab, I thought it would be great-- a great opportunity to come and work with other scientists and engineers who are also interested in improving teaching, or using research-based best practices in teaching.
