06/11/15
Dr. Adam Holden, chair of the Department of Teacher Education at Fort Hays State University, was awarded the Jonathan Bacon Leadership Award for the 2015 Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology.

The summer institute, known as SIDLIT, is sponsored by Colleague to Colleague (C2C), a professional association of faculty, staff and administrators from Kansas and Missouri.

The award recognizes Holden for being a leader in instructional technology and "pushing the envelope" towards a technology-based, student-centered learning oriented atmosphere.

Holden began an open education resources initiative in which every teacher education course exclusively uses free materials (OER) in place of requiring students to purchase textbooks.

He also created and piloted a new program for training pre-service teachers through a residency model that pulls students together as a cohort in a virtual environment using Google Classroom, Google Hangouts, Google Plus and other instructional technologies.

Holden will be recognized at the SIDLIT conference July 30 and 31, at Johnson County Community College.