Professor John E. Taylor was awarded the university's 2013 XCaliber Award for his "excellence as an individual involved in teaching with technology."
Taylor is an associate professor with the Vecellio Construction Engineering and Management Program at the College of Engineering and Principal faculty at the Myers-Lawson School of Construction.
The XCaliber award (short for exceptional, high-caliber contributions to technology-enriched learning activities) was established in 1996 by the Office of the Provost, and recognizes faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and teams (faculty, staff, and students) who have made significant contributions to integrating innovative technology in teaching and learning in a course or in a significant technology-enriched project.
Dr. Taylor, as part of his course utilized the CyberGRID virtual learning environment allowing students to interact directly with international scholars whose academic journal papers they were reading for the course. They used real-world case studies and participated in a semester-long team project that involved collaboration with student teams from India, the Netherlands, and the United States via CyberGRID. The main goal was to give students an opportunity to increase their understanding of a global project and in particular, global virtual project execution.
Taylor's citation states, "Professor Taylor has created a learning environment that replicates the skills and competencies engineers need in the 21st century. His CyberGRID provides students with an environment for developing collaborative and innovative strategies to address distributed design problem-solving in a global context."
