Dr. Milan Frankl was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award during University Canada West’s 14th Convocation ceremony. He has been teaching and working with the university for 15 years and teaching for more than 35 years.
Before his career as an instructor, he worked as a senior executive in the technology sector and was a partner in a major Canadian consulting firm for more than three decades. With an interest in teaching, he started teaching in his spare time, having now taught at a handful of schools across the country.
Dr. Frankl started teaching at University Canada West when it first opened back in 2005. He taught what would be the very first UCW MBA graduates.
“It was fantastic. In the first class we had five students at the MBA level. They were all mature students, face-to-face. It was more of a classroom school environment rather than a university, but they didn’t mind” he said.
In the early years of University Canada West, Dr. Frankl watched as the school grew and the number of students rapidly increased.
“Everyone was working as a small unit, making sure things work. We didn’t have many instructors at the time just enough to respond to the need, as the years passed and the number of students increased we had more people” he reminisced.
For a few years, Dr. Frankl acted as the Director of Operations while continuing as a full-time instructor. He helped supervise the growth of the university but stepped down when the university moved its operations to Vancouver to focus on teaching. Today he exclusively teaches in an online capacity for UCW as he lives on Vancouver Island.
Taking the challenge of teaching in this medium he discovered new advantages to online education.
“International students are very shy. They are not used to being expressive. They don’t participate very much. Online they are very present. There is less inhibition” he explained.
As an online instructor, Dr. Frankl is able to see where students have difficulty and where their effort is going. He uses the platform to help more students by finding where they are struggling and adjusting his teaching delivery method accordingly.
He said that can be more difficult in a classroom setting.
During his tenure with UCW, Dr. Frankl developed and delivered more than 36 courses for on-campus and online delivery for both the undergraduate BCom degree and the graduate level MBA degree programs. He also supervised more than 75 MBA theses, while teaching thousands of students from different walks of life and different parts of the world.
Dr. Frankl participates in a number of conferences on higher education in North America and Europe. He published more than 15 books covering a range of topics, including business, computer science and logic. Five of those books were published in collaboration with his MBA students, who graduated from UCW.
He is still active in the university, although he is semi-retired, he still teaches classes and remains a member of UCW’s Academic Council.
Dr. Frankl received his award before the 2019 graduating class of UCW and had some words for them.
“Thank you to my students. I have learned so much from them, that is my motivation to continue,” he said.
WRITTEN BY RAFAEL RAMIREZ
