Meet Lee Frankel-Goldwater: 2025 Teaching with Technology Award Winner

Each year, ASSETT awards the Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award to a faculty member who was nominated by their peers and students for their commitment to teaching with technology. For 2024-25 the award goes to Lee Frankel-Goldwater, a devoted social innovator and environmental educator, who has harnessed technology as an educator in novel ways. The CTL had the privilege to interview Lee about the projects he has undertaken in teaching with technology as well as his future aspirations.  

 Early Career 

Lee has a background in computer science, and he always had “a proclivity for using technology in novel contexts.” Although, like many computer scientists, he worked in industry at the start, he began to feel unfulfilled by this work. He always cared about teaching, and so he decided to get his PhD to pursue that more. During his PhD, he got involved with the CTL when he was teaching for continuing education as a Graduate Part Time Instructor (GPTI) in environmental studies and got his graduate teaching certificate.  

 Even this early on in his career, he was thinking about incorporating technology into his teaching. His reasons for using technology in the classroom included the fact that he values play and innovation, and, as he says, ultimately “it's really my curiosity for the way technology can be used to do things that you've never done before.” 

 Once hired as faculty at CU, Lee felt liberated to design and lead projects that address a need that is not currently being met. Now, without the expectation of publishing research, he could set his sights on starting programs that he felt were needed at the university.  

 Teaching Excellence and Onboarding Program  

He spearheaded Continuing Education’s Teaching Excellence Onboarding Program which was informed by his earlier experiences teaching. He recognized that “the ability to develop a new class is a very specialized skill,” yet every time he needed to do this, he found the resources and guidance to be insufficient. When he became a faculty member, he began modeling course design for his GPTIs and then slowly developing a short program for them, and he “saw the potential for a program like that to scale across the university.” So, he partnered with his colleagues at Continuing Education to develop an onboarding program to help instructors who were new to developing classes for online education.  

 AI Ambassadors  

When the emergence of AI became prevalent, Lee noticed that many people in academia were operating within their own silos. He saw that there were many stakeholders who had the potential to make incredible contributions to the conversation about AI, yet they weren't talking to one another. He had studied network and collaboration principles in his PhD, and he wanted to see if he could apply those frameworks to incite social change.  

 In 2024 he tested these frameworks by spearheading the creation of a program sponsored by ASSETT and the CTL called AI Ambassadors, which is currently in its second iteration this year. The key goals of the program were to create community and support innovations in teaching in the age of AI. Importantly, the conversations were to encourage interdisciplinary thinking and remove the taboos associated with discussing this topic.  

  “I wanted to help create a space where people can see different perspectives and illuminate different ways of thinking about the problem. So even if they make the same choices that they would have, they understand how that fits into the greater whole.” 

 BuffsCreate 

Lee believes in a concept called authentic learning, where it is important that “what we do in the classroom ideally gears towards as practical or as real as it can be, (it) models the real-world experience as closely as it can.” Every semester in his media studies course Lee has been using BuffsCreate to make a harvest website where everyone in the class as well as the public can see the work of each student. 

 Other Projects and Leadership Principles 

Lee has been involved with several other projects, including the Savory Global Institute, with several international projects with the Sustainability Laboratory, and an initiative with the Boulder Food Rescue. He feels that at the heart of his contributions to those projects, it wasn’t necessarily his background in computer science that drove his work in them but rather what he knew about systems thinking, which he elaborated on saying “nothing exists in isolation. ... things aren’t linear.” When you can see the whole system, it is easier to use technology as a tool to impact the system in a positive way.  

 Future Projects and Interests 

Lee has developed several innovative programs, but he has more that he wants to work on. He is interested in working on study abroad programs that relate to sustainability. If he were to dawn an entirely separate career hat, he mentioned his interest in community-oriented, local, clean energy transitions.  

 Lee, like many innovators and social entrepreneurs, is driven by so many questions. Some that continue to motivate him are, as he put it “will we as humanity reach our potential? And will that potential be one that’s filled with beauty and togetherness, or repeat the wheel of destructiveness?” He believes in the potential that humans have to make things better. “We have all these social and environmental challenges we are facing. And yet I believe in the beauty of what we have inside and the potential of what we could be…That we get past this industrial infancy that we’re in to something that’s beyond that. How do we do that? I think about that all the time.”  

 He highlights the fact that each person should make their contribution without trying to shoulder the weight of the entire world. “What role can I play in that as one in 7 plus billion people? How can I be a part of that whole in the most effective way, without trying to take responsibility for all? Because that’s not any of our jobs…it’s a collective act.” He asks these questions with genuine curiosity and an intention to answer them the best he can. 

“How do we do it? Can we do it? I have to believe that we can. What is the innovation, what is the thought process, the novelty, that could help us do it? Clearly, we haven’t figured out the exact right sauce yet. But I think we have the ingredients.”