College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• Outstanding from a distance

  Statistics professor honored by General Moters.



• General Motors offers over 150 distance learning courses from some of the top colleges and universities in the country.
  
  One of those offerings is an undergraduate statistics course at Iowa State University, which serves as a precursor to entering a master's degree program.
  
  Robert Stephenson, professor of statistics, developed and now teaches that course. General Motors provided Stephenson with a $40,000 grant to develop the course as the first step to offering a complete master's degree in statistics to its employees.
  
  Now after several years of teaching the course, Stephenson is being honored by General Motors with the company's Technical Education Program Outstanding Distance Learning Faculty Award. The award is given each year to one faculty member who teaches courses to GM employees.
  
  Stephenson is modest when he describes the process.
  
  "There is a committee within General Motors that looks at the evaluations of the distance education instructors," he said. "They interview some of the students of the instructors with high evaluations before selecting the winner."
  
  His department chair, Dean Isaacson, isn't quite as humble.
  
  "They (GM) don't tolerate bad professors," he said. "They get some of the best (teachers) from these schools since over the years the poor teachers are weeded out. GM simply takes a bid from another school if a teacher is not up to their standards."
  
  Those schools include Stanford, Michigan, Purdue, Rensselaer and Maryland.
  
  Isaacson said Stephenson's honor is even more impressive when you consider he was teaching a course that many of the GM employees weren't familiar with.
  
  "Bob was cited for teaching a very practical course and for being accessible to the GM students," he said. "While Bob was teaching statistics, the other nominees were teaching courses in engineering and management which are preferred topics for GM employees."
  
  

Around LAS
March 6-19, 2000

Ames, Iowa 50011, (515) 294-4111. Published by: University Relations, online@iastate.edu. Copyright © 1995-2004, Iowa State University of Science and Technology. All rights reserved.

Non-Discrimination Statement and Information Disclosures

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Ames, Iowa 50011-1302

General Information: (515) 294-7740

Academic Advising: (515) 294-4831

Email: las@iastate.edu

Michael Whiteford - Dean

Bret Larwick - Director of Technology

Dave Gieseke - Director of Communications