HSE Awards Best Teachers of 2016
The Higher School of Economics has selected its Best Teachers of 2016. This year the voting process was different from previous years’, and First Vice Rector Vadim Radaev explains how.
Vadim Radaev
This year the competition for the best teacher of the year award was very different from previous years’. We had set ourselves four goals: make the voting procedure easier, and faster, get more students and alumni to vote, make the organizational side easier, and improve the selection criteria. We are happy to report back that we were successful on all these points. Finally the competition for best teacher of the year was held university-wide. If previous years contests took place only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then this year we were also able to include Perm and Nizhny Novgorod. These branches displayed a particularly high turnout: across faculties over 60% of students voted (the figure was as high as 89% for the Humanities Faculty in Nizhny Novgorod). Moscow saw record turnout of 76%, compared to previous highs of just 49%. An impressive 90% of students in the Computer Sciences and Mathematics Faculties voted.
This increase is in large part due to the modernization initiative that brought the election online, linked to the LMS ‘Rate Your Course’ module. Students could cast their vote from any location at any time over a three-week period. Gone are the old days of having to trek into the University to vote on a particular day and put your voting paper into the ballot box, or cast your vote from the computer room.
In order to make it a more user-friendly process, and to save time, we brought two procedures together: you could vote immediately after completing the compulsory module to rate your teacher and course. And although voting was not mandatory, I am glad to say that so many students thought it was not a waste of time, and instead took it seriously. A total of 470 people on the Moscow campus received the minimum number of votes to be considered.
There were three categories of winner: the first, and most numerous – those selected through student votes; the second – academic supervisors selected via the contest for academic research work, and the third – teachers selected by alumni who graduated last year.
We also defined the selection criteria more strictly – winners had to receive no less than the minimum number of votes by students in any one course (e.g. 1st year BA Political Sciences), while also having to exceed the university-wide threshold for votes cast. These parameters were set to ensure that the teaching bonus can be applied and to ensure that the best teachers receive the bonus, whether they work full time (bonus of 30,000 roubles), are tenured but work part-time (15,000 roubles), or part-time teachers (bonus 15,000 roubles).
As is traditional, teachers are given paper letters of appreciation, which we do not yet want to digitize, and this year teachers received 132 letters. This year we placed the boxes for these letters in the hallways to make them more noticeable. Teaching staff will undoubtedly welcome these letters from their students – perhaps as much as winning this contest.
So let us take this opportunity to congratulate all the winners!
You can see the full results here.