Prof. Terry Ryan
By Daniel Firpo

Terry Ryan received his Ph.D from Indiana University in 1989.  His doctoral dissertation was titled "Assessing MIS User Satisfaction Levels."  He has previously taught at Marquette University, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Indiana University South Bend.  He has taught at Claremont Graduate University since the summer of 2001.

He mainly teaches courses in systems analysis and design, web development, large-scale software development, and database systems (a new professor, Dr. Gondy Leroy has since taken over responsibility for teaching database systems, but Dr. Ryan still occasionally teaches it).  Dr. Ryan also teaches seminars on information science research and research methods.

His teaching style emphasizes group discussion over lecturing.  Class sizes at the School of Information Science and Technology tend to be relatively small, sometimes consisting of between five to fifteen students.  Oftentimes, many of these students have had prior experience with some of the course material.  Because of this, rather than lecture to students, he prefers to cultivate a group discussion between students, where students share and discuss their hands-on knowledge and prior experience in the subject matter.  Dr. Ryan acts as a discussion moderator, leading the direction of the conversation, bringing up topics and issues, and of course, talks about his own experiences and opinions about the subject matter.

Leadership, group dynamics, and social learning are big areas of interest for Dr. Ryan, and they play a big role in his teaching style and research interests.

In his classes, participation in class discussion is a must, oftentimes worth more than a fifth of the total course grade.  When discussing systems development in his classes, he will always reliably advocate Agile Software Development, a people-centric method of software development that emphasizes small groups of highly motivated developers and face-to-face communication.

Dr. Ryan’s main research interests are teaching and learning in university and organizational settings, and online discussion and dialogue.  He is Co-Director, with Lorne Olfman (co-author on several of Dr. Ryan's publications), of the CGU Social Learning Software Lab (SL^2), which seeks to create effective software solutions to social learning (www.claremontconversation.org is a product of SL^2).

Aside from his main focus on social learning, Dr. Ryan’s other research interests include preparing for and responding to emergencies.  Most of his projects are aimed at the advancement of information science theory.  Recently, Dr. Ryan has taken an interest in Design Research, encouraged by the Design Science Research in Information Science and Technology (DESRIST) Conference that took place on CGU earlier this year.  This kind of research involves the design, development, and evaluation if IS applications and artifacts, and the determinants of their effectiveness.