Audra Anjum
| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Award (Teaching) |
| Project Title: | Novel Approaches to Faculty Development and Student Engagement in Higher Education |
| Field of Study: | Education |
| Home Institution: | Ohio University, Athens, OH |
| Host Institution: | JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research, Mysuru, Karnataka |
| Grant Start Month: | February 2024 |
| Duration of Grant: | Nine months |
Brief Bio:
Dr. Audra Anjum is an instructional designer at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. She earned a PhD in instructional technology and an MA in applied linguistics, both from Ohio University, and a BA in English from Wilmington College, Ohio. Dr. Anjum’s teaching experience includes teaching undergraduate courses at Ohio University and at institutions abroad. She has taught in many different teaching modalities across different types of learners. Over the past decade of her professional practice, Dr. Anjum’s work as an instructional designer has mainly centered around faculty development and course design. She has delivered several faculty development workshops both in the United States and India, as well as collaborated with over one 100 faculty members and subject-matter experts on all or parts of hundreds of courses, seminars, and other transformative learning experiences.
Dr. Anjum’s primary research focus is on investigating the individual differences and factors that influence instructors’ decisions to use technology in university settings, wherein the integration of enterprise-wide solutions is implicitly mandatory. The impetus to pursue this line of research mainly stems from her efforts to reframe current approaches to faculty support initiatives with greater empathy, by leveraging differences among instructors’ varying coping responses to workplace stressors (like the use of technology) rather than through instructional best practices and institutional mandates. She is also involved in capacity-building efforts for promoting teacher training at Ohio University wherein she frequently collaborates with both pre- and in-service instructors across a wide range of disciplines who are interested in contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning within their areas of expertise.
Dr. Anjum’s Fulbright-Nehru project is facilitating a capacity-building program for instructional design and faculty development at the JSS Medical College in Mysuru, India. She is carrying this out in collaboration with the faculty and administration. She is also teaching classes and opening up a series of professional development opportunities to enhance teaching practices and student engagement, with specific focus on topics such as technology use, accessibility and inclusivity, active learning strategies, and multimedia development.