MIT’s Teaching with Digital Technology Awards are student-nominated awards for faculty and instructors who have effectively used digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT. Co-sponsored by Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor, the goal is to recognize our educators for their innovations and to give the MIT community the opportunity to learn from their practices.

At an award ceremony on May 24, Vice Chancellor Waitz shared a summary from each winner’s nomination: Read More.

Congratulations to Takako, Leanna, and Emma!

You can hear from some of our fabulous award winners below.

Takako Aikawa is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese. She teaches Japanese from introductory to advanced levels, and leads the Japanese language curriculum. Prior to joining Global Languages in 2013, she worked at Microsoft Research in machine translation and natural language processing and was an instructor of Japanese at universities in Japan and the United States. Takako Aikawa’s pedagogical research foci include the incorporation of technology in language education, the use of corpus data in language learning, and natural language processing. Her current projects focus on the application of virtual reality to recreate immersive learning environments, and artificial intelligence to spot and correct common learner errors in written text.

Leanna Bridge Rezvani is a Lecturer in French, teaching primarily at the introductory levels of the curriculum and also leading 21G.310 French Conversation: Intensive Practice. Prior to joining MIT in 2006, she taught at Boston College. Rezvani has published articles on 16th and 17th-century women writers including Marguerite de Navarre and Madame de Lafayette, as well as developing open pedagogical resources for instruction on related works and texts. She frequently presents her works at medieval and Renaissance literature society meetings. Rezvani’s pedagogical fields of interest include the praxis of language and culture, religion and literature, and the use of technology in language pedagogy.

Emma J. Teng is the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at MIT. She holds an appointment on the History faculty and is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. Teng teaches courses on Chinese culture, Chinese migration history, Asian American history, East Asian culture, and women’s and gender studies. She earned her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where she specialized in Chinese studies and Asian American studies. Her first book, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 (Harvard 2004), a study of Chinese colonial discourses on Taiwan, places the China-Taiwan relationship in the historical context of Chinese imperial expansionism. Her following book, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 (University of California 2013) examines ideas concerning racial intermixing and the lived experiences of mixed families in China and the US between 1842 and 1943.