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Randall Bass

Randall (Randy) J. Bass is an American professor of English and the Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives at Georgetown University. He is a prominent figure in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and digital pedagogy, known for his work on the intersection of new media and university transformation.

Education

Bass earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and History from the University of the Pacific in 1981.

He pursued graduate studies at Brown University, where he completed a Master of Arts in 1987 and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1991. His doctoral research focused on American literature and culture, which informed his later scholarship in digital humanities.

Career and leadership

Bass has held multiple leadership positions at Georgetown University over three decades. He was the founding executive director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) from 2000 to 2013. He subsequently served as Vice Provost for Education for seven years before his appointment as Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives in 2020.

In 1994, he directed the American Studies Crossroads Project, the first web-based project funded by the FIPSE. He also led the Visible Knowledge Project (2000–2005), a national initiative involving 21 campuses exploring technology's impact on learning.

At Georgetown, he oversees the Designing the Future(s) of the University initiative and the Red House incubator. Since 2024, he has served as a Senior Advisor to the President at the University of North Texas.

Academic leadership and service

Bass holds several advisory and governance roles:

Scholarship

Bass is recognized for his 1999 essay, "The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?", a foundational text in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). He argued that instructional "problems" should be viewed as scholarly opportunities for investigation. He published an updated reflection, "What's the Problem Now?", in 2020.

Honors

In 1999, Bass received the EDUCAUSE Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Technology and Undergraduate Education. He was a Pew Scholar and Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (1998–1999).

Selected works

  • Border Texts: Cultural Readings for Contemporary Writers (Houghton Mifflin, 1999)
  • Beyond Borders: A Cultural Reader (Houghton Mifflin, 2002)
  • The Difference that Inquiry Makes: A Collaborative Case Study on Technology and Learning (co-edited with Bret Eynon, 2009).
  • "Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem of Learning in Higher Education" (2012) in EDUCAUSE Review.
  • Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem (with Bret Eynon, AAC&U, 2016)
  • Understanding Writing Transfer: Implications for Transformative Student Learning in Higher Education (co-edited with Jessie Moore, Stylus, 2017).
  • "Coda: A Wicked Problems Mindset for Educational Development" (2022) in To Improve the Academy.

References

External links