Terry Morris garners Greenhouse Award

Prescott, Arizona—March 17, 2006 — Terry Morris, college prof and NCU Learner, designed a course that was the winner in the Blackboard, Inc.2006 Greenhouse Exemplary Online Course Award. Ms. Morris, from Libertyville, Illinois, is an NCU Learner working on her Ed.D. She is also an Assistant Professor at William Rainy Harper College in Pallatine, Ill., where she teaches courses on web development and computer information systems.

The course Morris developed that won the Greenhouse award is "E-Commerce Development." She summarized the course (for those who want to sign up, that's CIS 218) for the syllabus: "Provides the student with a foundation in the fundamentals of Electronic Commerce development. Software, hardware, security, payment systems, promotion and support strategies, Electronic Data Interchange, web auctions, international issues, legal implications, ethical issues, and taxation are among topics covered." The course introduces the foundation concepts of E-Commerce and provides students practice as they create their own e-commerce stores.

This is not the first award for Professor Morris. She was also honored with Harper College's Glenn A. Reich Memorial Award for Instructional Technology. This award was in recognition of her work in designing the college's CIS web development program, courses, and course resource web sites that standardized the course for adjuncts and provided students with a central source for course information. She also worked with other faculty members, developing workshops to help them with web design for instructional use. Additionally, she is the author of a textbook, Web Developer Foundations: Using XHTML, now in its third edition.

Her award-winning course "is the result of years of effort," Morris says. "I started teaching this class online in 2000 and have been revising, improving, and modifying it every year based on student survey responses and my increased knowledge of online pedagogy.

"I also continuously revise this course to keep up-to-date with new developments and changing industry trends. The course utilizes semester-long projects with built-in coaching/mentoring milestones, opportunities for students to create e-commerce stores, Web research discussion questions, multimedia e-commerce business ethics case studies, and review activities using multimedia puzzles and games."

The Greenhouse Exemplary Course Awards are honors based on online pedagogy and use of technology. Awards are made in three categories. Exemplary Course—which Morris won— Exemplary Campus Services, and Communities of Practice. Entries are judged by a panel comprising leading faculty and administrators involved in the use of education technology. The award's sponsor, Blackboard, Inc., is a leader in providing enterprise software applications and related services to the education industry. Thousands of schools worldwide, from K-12 to post-secondary institutions, along with businesses and government agencies, use the Blackboard system for online education and to augment classroom-based programs, as well as for other training functions.