Collins administrator bids farewell

IU will lose another administrator today when Iris Yob, academic coordinator of the Collins Living-Learning Center, works her last day in the residence hall before leaving to pursue other career options.\nYob, 58, served for six years as the academic coordinator, a job whose functions include serving as the faculty advisor and a virtual department chairwoman of the LLC's Board of Education Programming. BOEP is the organization responsible for the residential learning program which organizes courses each semester. BOEP is a committee run by the center's students for the LLC and fits with Yob's philosophy of education. That philosophy holds two principles -- student centeredness and experience-based learning. \n"She was my mentor as a professional in education and I'm really sad to see her leave," said Mark Helmsing. "She was instrumental in the learning part of the Living-Learning Center. She was close to a lot of residents."\nYob, who immigrated to the United States from Australia in 1983, said she is leaving for a number of reasons, including wanting to fully utilizing her credentials. She earned an Ed.D. in 1990 from Harvard University in the philosophy of education. Once she leaves, she will become chair of doctoral studies in education at Walden University, a distance learning university that occupies several floors of a high rise in Minneapolis, Minn. \n"It might be good for Collins and for me to have a change. And there are some things about the Walden job that are very attractive at this stage in my career financially," Yob said, whose salary is roughly $38,000 a year. \nThe job at Walden is similar to her work at Collins in that it will involve student-centered learning and experience-based learning. Yob said at Walden, students are largely responsible for designing their own degree.\nThere Yob will oversee a faculty of 50 to 60 contract faculty members and roughly 500 students in the education program. She will also be involved in designing an Ed.D. program as well as a new degree in Community College Leadership.\nYob made her decision official in a letter of resignation to Collins Director Carl Ziegler and Dean Kumble Subbaswamy of the College of Arts and Sciences on Jan. 21.\nIn her letter, she said her time at Collins were six and a half of the most interesting years of her professional life.