Associate Professor Jeff Lingwall garners 2024 Online MBA Outstanding Faculty Award

For Jeff Lingwall, teaching a class is like dancing when done correctly.
“You have someone leading: the faculty member,” he said. “When the students are engaged, it’s a back and forth. You say, ‘What do you think about this?’ Then, they come back with questions. You dance back and forth and create something special.”

Lingwall has been making beautiful music as an associate professor of management at Boise State University for more than five years. He is a 2024 Online Master of Business Administration (MBA) Outstanding Faculty Award recipient.

“It’s nice to receive the award,” he said. “It was voted on by the MBA students. I hope it shows that good pedagogy can extend from a physical classroom to an online classroom. It’s the same principles.”

Lingwall teaches BUSMBA 545 Business Law and Ethics in the Online MBA. He is also in his first year as associate chair of the management department.

“In an online classroom, it’s getting people to talk to each other, and trying to craft exercises where they can bring some of themselves to the table, then engage both themselves and the material and each other,” he said. “That’s what we’ve tried to do with the MBA program — get their wonderful industry experience and get them to think about it in terms of the legal and ethical environment they work in.

“Then, we give them interesting questions to apply to that and hash it out together, to talk through it and teach each other. They try as much as possible to do it in actual discussion.

“In an asynchronous class, the ability to do that and for me to drop in on those discussions and listen and weigh in has been really fun. That goes quite well in that class.”

Finding a rhythm

Lingwall grew up in Southern Utah. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in statistics with an emphasis in business analytics in 2006. He later earned two master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in statistics (2007) and economics and public policy (2010).

“I thought I was going to do a doctorate in statistics and public policy,” he said. “I was interested in policy issues, and statistics seemed a good continuation. I ultimately switched it to economics and public policy.

“I was doing the doctorate and had a strong feeling that I wanted to go to law school. I found an advisor who thought economics and law could work, so I switched to that path. That’s what my research has been — law and economics. I did the doctorate and law school at the same time.”

After graduating with a law degree from Yale University in 2013, Lingwall was working as a class action defense lawyer when his first teaching opportunity came along.

“The judge who I had clerked for after law school randomly emailed one day about a teaching position at Truman State University,” he said. “I wanted to teach and liked it, so I took that job and switched from class action defense to teaching law.”

Lingwall taught at Truman State for more than four years and won an Excellence in Teaching award in 2017. He moved west to be closer to family when an opportunity arose.

“Boise State is a great position,” he said. “The quality of life here is wonderful. Boise is a great place to live. We’ve lived all over the country, and Boise is our favorite.”

Choreographing success

Another aspect of teaching in the Online MBA Lingwall especially enjoys is the interaction among the students.

“In a lot of these small groups we form, you get a wide variety of business backgrounds,” he said. “You’ll have someone coming from the military along with someone who is an entrepreneur and someone local. You get a great mix.

“Sometimes we get groups that naturally form, like four or five people who are all in the health care industry. That’s also beneficial. You get good discussions when they can all relate to each other. They’re also all quite different, so it works both ways.”

With nearly a decade of teaching experience, Lingwall thrives on moments when everything clicks.

“You can have an amazing intellectual experience with the students when you can get them engaged, go back and forth and share knowledge and experiences in a really fun way,” he said. “You walk away from those class sessions loving life.”

Lingwall also enjoys finding concise and creative ways to make learning any subject matter enjoyable for his students.

“I like to take something complex and figure out how to convey it in a way that’s clear and fun,” he said. “If you can figure out a complicated concept like employment law, but you can bring in clips from ‘The Office’ and interesting cases, and you can teach it both clearly and in a way that’s engaging, that’s fun.

“That’s the craft of teaching, which is fascinating to me. If you can structure a lesson like that and pull it off in the classroom, it’s a very fulfilling experience.”

Lingwall plans to keep perfecting his teaching craft.

“The goal was always to be teaching,” he said. “If I don’t teach, I get anxious. It’s in my blood.”

Learn more about the Online MBA

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