About the Outstanding Instructor Award

Since 2023, the UBC Okanagan Outstanding Instructor Award has supported Faculties in recognizing exemplary instructors within their departments who have demonstrated teaching excellence and a strong commitment to student success over a three-year period.

Award Distribution

Each Faculty is allocated a number of awards to recognize approximately 5% of instructors. The distribution is based on the number of non-sessional faculty teaching courses over the academic year, with an additional award for a sessional instructor within each faculty.

Please note that while awards are allocated to each school or department within the Faculty, Faculties may request to shift their allocations for an academic year. 

Download detailed distribution

Award selection and criteria

Each Faculty and/or department determines their own equitable processes for adjudicating the awards for eligible continuing term faculty members and sessional instructors. A list of award criteria is included below, however, individual Faculties may choose to refine and weight the following criteria as appropriate to support their award selection process.

Criteria

1. Strong evidence of student-centric, excellent learning experiences.
   • Such as Student Experience of Instruction (SEI) and other student feedback, Thank-A-Prof references, peer evaluations and other teaching recognitions.
2. Demonstrated ability to teach in multiple environments, depending on the Faculty teaching context and priorities.
   • Such as large courses, multi-modal teaching and active and experiential learning. High student engagement and positive student feedback may be preferred.
3. Contributions to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and educational leadership activities are not criteria for the award, except as they can be shown to directly benefit student learning.

Support Available: The Centre for Teaching and Learning is available to support Faculties in developing equitable award selection processes. Please contact Jannik Eikenaar, Academic Director, Centre for Teaching and Learning, to discuss further.

Eligibility

Any faculty member with a continuing tenured or tenure-track appointment or lecturer who was a course instructor during the prior academic year, including summer session, is eligible to receive the award. Sessional instructors are evaluated separately, with one award for each Faculty.

An instructor is eligible to receive the award every three years.

Important dates

Award submissions

Each Faculty must submit the following information to confirm their awardees for the academic year:

• • Name of nominee
  • Nature of appointment (rank, department/school, faculty)
  • 250-word description of why the nominee has been selected for the award

Faculties can submit their award recipients using the online Qualtrics submission form below.

Submit Now

Past Outstanding Instructor Award recipients

For questions about the Outstanding Instructor Award, please contact:

Office of the Provost and Vice-President, Academic
ubco.provost@ubc. ca