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.