COPLAC 2024 Award Winners

Dr. Cynthia Alby, professor of secondary education, is the 2024 winner of the Charles Dunn Award. The Dunn Award is given by the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC).

“Dr. Alby’s work exemplifies the value of attending a place like Georgia College & State University,” said Dr. Cole Woodcox, executive director of COPLAC. “On behalf of the 30-member COPLAC Board of Directors, I want congratulate Dr. Alby on this recognition of her exceptional work to advance students' success at GCSU.”

Dr. Alby studies pedagogy, sociology, neuroscience, behavioral economics – anything that might yield clues to answering her primary research question: How might we re-enchant learning to help faculty and students flourish? She joined Georgia College in 2001.

She recently published a book with three COPLAC colleagues that is being used in many professional learning communities, “Learning that matters: A field guide to course design for transformative education.”
‍
Dr. Alby has won four university-level awards, two for scholarship in teaching and learning, one for service and one for department of excellence. Along with her work on transformative course design, she spent the past year and a half writing and speaking extensively across the country on artificial intelligence in higher education and has been featured on a variety of podcasts including “Teaching in Higher Ed.”
‍
For nearly 20 years Dr. Alby has helped to develop faculty from across the state in Georgia’s “Governor’s Teaching Fellows Program” through the Louise McBee Institute for Higher Education at UGA. She recently began work on a blog called “The Year of Teaching Dangerously.”

Recent Georgia College alumna Nicole Snyder, '24, also won a 2024 COPLAC Award. Snyder was awarded the David J. Prior Award for her essay titled “A Life of Multitudes” about how chemistry and dance are intertwined in countless ways.