Teaching Excellence Award for Mattias Rost

Mattias Rost receives award Congratulations to Mattias Rost for his Teaching Excellence Award. This award has been presented to him by College of Science and Engineering at the University of Glasgow. It is one of just three Teaching Excellence awards presented in 2015, and the only one presented to a Computer Scientist.

Mattias  has taught and supervised students and staff in innovative ways and often on his own initiative. His key contributions to teaching at the University so far have been:

The creation and delivery of three hands-on tutorials to introduce students and staff to new, cutting-edge technology. Mattias has designed and delivered three two-hour tutorials on cutting edge programming technologies: two on the D3.js visualization language, and one on the Apache Cordova app development framework. The tutorials attracted diverse attendees including researchers, lecturers, professors, postgraduates and undergraduates. The impact of the tutorials includes:

  • Flattening of the University hierarchy – It was notable at these events that undergraduate students were learning alongside academic staff including professors.
  • Exposure of staff and students to new technology – This has gone on to influence teaching and research, including the uptake of D3.js within some teaching exercises, and the use of D3.js in a research project.
  • Generation of new project proposal – Following the Apache Cordova Tutorial, an undergraduate student and staff member created a studentship application that included use of this technology.

Highly effective Supervision of undergraduate and postgraduate projects. Mattias has supervised least five student projects in the last 24 months (which is over and above what is ordinarily expected for an early career researcher). The quality of supervision has been extremely high. This is evidenced by:

  • Several students have progressed beyond creating research prototypes to releasing their apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. These include “Forget me not” and “One note”.
  • A group of level 3 undergraduates supervised by Rost won an award from Morgan Stanley for their project “Forget-me-not”,
  • Mattias has effectively led students through the research ethics process, but has gone beyond this by instructing students in how to create ethical frameworks and privacy policies for apps released to the public. For example the following privacy policy https://forgetmenot.me.uk/privacy.html was created to meet stringent guidelines set out by Apple and which passed their review process.

Contributions to undergraduate courses. Mattias has delivered individual lectures to undergraduate students in Computing Science, and has influenced the content in several courses. He has excelled in this in the following respects:

  • Mattias has supported the development of teaching materials relating to D3.js visualization.
  • When giving lectures Matias has been able to relate the high level ideas in the lecture materials to specific, contemporary examples from his own work.
  • Mattias has on one occasion agreed to give a lecture with less than 48 hours notice (to cover absence). The lecture would otherwise have been cancelled.
  • Mattias was also invited to give a lecture in 2014 at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden as part of an undergraduate course on social media analysis, in which he discussed his research on analyzing big data sets from Foursquare.

Giving professional talks at industry focused events. Mattias has contributed to a number of outreach and industry focused events. For example:

  • In March 2015 Rost gave a presentation at “Mobile App Meetup” to a large group of professional developers. This was held in the School of Computing Science and attracted a large number of professionals to the school, along with many students.

rost-lecture

Mattias Rost deserved a teaching excellence award for reasons including:

Showing initiative in teaching – Mattias is employed on a research contract. It is therefore not required of him to do any teaching other than that specified by his line manager. However, under his own initiative, Mattias has designed and delivered learning opportunities for staff, students and professionals.

Recognition of effort – Mattias has done this teaching on a volunteer basis under his own initiative. He has put substantial effort into developing new teaching material and guiding students through processes such as creating Apple app privacy policies.

Effectiveness – Mattias’ teaching has been influential on staff and students, leading to new projects, changes to lecture materials, and to student awards.

Innovation – Mattias has created new opportunities for teaching, for example there was no existing tutorial series for staff and students, and so these were created from scratch by Mattias to form a new category of event for the School.

Transfer of expertise into teaching – Mattias’ teaching and supervision focuses on cutting edge technologies that he uses and creates in his own research.

As a part of this award, Mattias Rost has been awarded 1000 pounds to further develop his teaching at the University of Glasgow.

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