Inaugural Professor Series Highlights Mimi Recker

Professor Mimi Recker gave a presentation Tuesday, Jan. 31, at President Stan Albrecht’s home as part of the Inaugural Professor Lecture Series at Utah State University.

Recker is professor in the department of instructional technology. Her faculty research interests are digital libraries for education and design of interactive learning environments.

For the past five years Recker and a team of researchers have been creating Instructional Architect, a free Internet resource for teachers, with the help of 1.7 million in grant money from the National Science Foundation.

Recker explained that Instructional Architect is a continually evolving, real time resource. It lets teachers make better use of online learning and provide their students with the most accurate, up-to-date information, particularly in mathematics, science, engineering and technology fields.

“The idea behind Instructional Architect is to help teachers access a vast amount of high quality learning resources that are on the net,” Recker said.

Since Instructional Architects implementation, more than 1,000 accounts have been registered mostly in the state of Utah, but also in Michigan, New York and Colorado.

Recker received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and held academic positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

“Utah State has an outstanding instructional technology program and it is one of the oldest in the nation,” Recker said when discussing her decision to come to USU.