Turner Business

Turner Business is proud to announce that the winner of the 2025 Turner College Online Teaching Award is management information systems professor Jennifer Pitts . Pitts' impressive winning portfolio emphasizes that her approach to online teaching is grounded in evidence-based practices that support student success and equity in learning. All of her online courses (1) are developed by Quality Matters and Online Learning Consortium standards, ensuring accessibility to meet the needs of all learners, (2) integrate applied, real-world assignments that promote student engagement, critical thinking, and persistence, (3) ensure frequent, intentional interactions through instructor feedback, discussion boards, team-based projects, and formative assessments, and (4) incorporate tools such as Microsoft Teams to facilitate team collaboration and utilize discussion forums for student-student interaction, enabling students to engage in problem-solving and applied learning. Again...

Turner Business is proud to announce that the winner of the 2025 Turner College Research Award is TSYS School computer science professor Rahmatullah Roche . Roche's winning portfolio is quite impressive. In 2024, he published studies on neural and transformer networks in Nucleic Acids Research and Biology Methods & Protocols . Based on ratings provided by Scimago, the first of the outlets listed above is designated as an A-level journal, while the second holds the B-level designation. The previous year, 2023, was just as productive for Roche. Then he published in PLoS Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Advances , another A-level/B-level combination. Roche preceded these achievements with two 2022 publications in Proteins: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics , a B-level journal. In 2021, Roche produced a third A-level/B-level combination with his publications in PLoS Computational Biology and Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences , while 2020 arrived with another A-lev...

Turner Business is proud to announce that Turner College accounting professor Charles Boster is the winner of the 2025 Turner College Graduate Teaching Award. Boster teaches accounting in the MBA program, which moved to hybrid teaching schedules in Fall 2024. To accommodate this move, Boster revamped his course, including in- and out of-class activities along with scheduled topics. As part of that process, he added practice exercises to develop application skills for fundamental concepts and altered material sequencing to better align classroom activities and group project deliverables. Learning assessments in Boster's accounting course include vocabulary exercises, calculation exercises, and problem solving. In each case, he takes a formative approach to emphasize learning over grade performance.

Turner Business is proud to announce that Turner College economist Wen Shi is the winner of the 2025 Turner College Teaching Award. In recent years, Shi has actively participated in the Gateways to Completion (G2C) program, the Quality Enhancement Plan, Faculty Writing Fellowship, and Quality Matters design for online courses. She also joined the pilot cohort of CSU's Core Course Design Institution in Fall 2024, attending all 8-week meetings and working productively with the other seven members of the cohort to complete tasks and activities during each session of the Institute. For post-institute implementation, she will work with facilitators, peer mentors, and the department chair to guide the sustained implementation of the ECON 2105 in-person course changes in Fall 2025. Shi has attended more than 60 professional development events in pedagogy, presented for CSU Marching Toward Equity webinar and is schedule to give a talk in the upcoming 2025 USG Teaching and Learning Confer...

TSYS School computer scientist Rodrigo Obando was a big winner at Tuesday's 2025 CSU Faculty and Staff Awards Ceremony, taking home the 2025 CSU Teaching Innovation Award. This award recognizes and rewards the efforts of faculty members who develop and practice innovative methodologies in pedagogy. This award showcases the creative innovations of the faculty members that facilitate enhanced learning. This award specifically focuses on the uniqueness of the "program actions" that increase student interest and drive achievement. This award recognizes the effort and documentation of outcomes by the faculty member attempting to create a new learning strategy or methodology and celebrates the faculty's willingness to expand boundaries of traditional and established teaching strategies. In his board game design course Obando covers the history of games. In doing so, his students are tasked with quickly creating and testing a simple board game. Additionally, the students ar...

TSYS School computer scientist Linqiang Ge was a big winner at Tuesday's 2025 CSU Faculty and Staff Awards Ceremony, taking home the 2025 CSU Excellence in Online Teaching Award. This award recognizes a faculty member's strong commitment to quality online teaching and learning. The criteria for selection include demonstration of teaching, service and scholarly activities designed to advance the quality of online teaching and learning; the use of effective and innovative online teaching practices that result in student engagement, student satisfaction, and effectiveness in achieving desired learning outcomes; and an extraordinary commitment to fostering the academic success of online students through the development of rapport with individual learners in and beyond the virtual classroom. For online courses, Ge records all the lectures and posts the videos on CougarView. He arranges evening time as office hours since many online graduate students have daily jobs. Within the clas...

Turner College professor of finance Brett Cotten  was a big winner at Tuesday's  2025 CSU Faculty and Staff Awards Ceremony,  taking home the 2025 CSU Chappell Graduate Teaching Award. This award recognizes those full-time members of the Columbus State University Graduate Faculty who, in the tradition established by William "Bill" Chappell, have demonstrated excellence in teaching Columbus State University's graduate students and have contributed outstanding professional service to the Graduate School, the University and the community. This past year Cotten  worked with and provided input toward the development of the finance portion of a new MBA class, Foundations for Business, and he rejoined the graduate faculty in the Turner College in teaching the MBA course in managerial finance. His MBA course includes a capital budgeting project in which students analyze a project under consideration by a firm. Students are required to build proforma financial statements...