Bretl wins College’s Rose, Everitt awards for teaching excellence

3/28/2016 Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

Tim Bretl is becoming one of the most highly honored teachers in Aerospace Engineering at Illinois.

Written by Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

 

Tim Bretl in the classroom.
Tim Bretl in the classroom.
Tim Bretl in the classroom.

For the second consecutive year, the College of Engineering at Illinois has recognized Tim Bretl as a superior educator by honoring him with prestigious teaching awards.

 

Bretl, an associate professor in Aerospace Engineering at Illinois, won the Collins Award for Innovative Teaching in 2015. That has been followed this year with the College’s Rose Award for Teaching Excellence, and the William L. Everitt Award from the student-led Engineering Council organization.

A member of AE’s faculty since 2006, Bretl has given considerable thought and energy to improving his teaching abilities, and his students have shown their appreciation. His Instructor & Course Evaluation System (ICES) scores are the best in the AE Department. In fact, for one required course he was awarded a perfect 5.0 ICES score, a feat Department Head Philippe Geubelle said he had not witnessed in 20 years at Illinois.

“When the senior class found out in August 2014 that (Bretl) was going to teach the controls lab course (AE483), they gave him an ovation at his first lecture, another thing that I have never witnessed over my 20-year career at Illinois,” Geubelle said.

Bretl created AE 483 a few years ago as part of a bigger emphasis placed in the Department on exposing AE students to the area of aerospace controls. He spent a tremendous amount of time and effort developing a successful strategy for teaching the students the programming skills they need to autopilot quadcopters, which serves as the course’s “implementation hardware.” An ABET reviewer made special note of the course, labeling it “truly unique among all aerospace engineering programs across the country.”

Bretl more recently revamped AE 353, a junior-level foundational course on aerospace controls, and one that previously garnered low student satisfaction. He improved the course’s relevance for the students by incorporating a set of applications involving the design of “practical aerospace control systems.”

The students’ responses were enthusiastic. “These characteristics helped to make AE 353 the class in which I have learned the most, and had the most enjoyable and easiest time doing it,” wrote one student. “This was most certainly not due to a lack of rigor, but rather a well-structured and thoughtfully designed course.”

Bretl consistently is included on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, and was chosen as the 2015 AE Teacher of the Year by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) student organization.
 


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This story was published March 28, 2016.