Greg Collins (Business) Prizes Data-Driven Teaching

In Spring 2021, during his second semester at Muhlenberg, Assistant Professor of Business Greg Collins was teaching an analytics course. His students wanted to learn the visual analytics platform Tableau, which was not on the syllabus. So, Collins learned it himself and then invited students to join him Friday afternoons for instruction. That was the beginning of The Data Lab, free workshops held Fridays in the spring for students, faculty and staff. Since 2022, Muhlenberg students have been the teachers, and the offerings have expanded to include lessons on Excel and the programming language Python. Collins is currently advising business administration major Jenny Maxwell ’24 on an independent study to better brand and expand The Data Lab’s presence on campus — a hands-on project supporting another hands-on project.

“I believe experiential learning is really valuable both as a way to prepare for future endeavors and as a means to more complete learning today,” Collins says. “We ask better questions and demand better answers when we’re going to actively do something, create something with those answers.”

Part of what drew Collins to Muhlenberg was its strong culture of undergraduate research. He sought the opportunity to teach not only in the classroom but through involving students in his work — and inspiring them to learn by doing. A former public school teacher, Collins studies education finance and policy. Prior to joining Muhlenberg, he co-authored Pennsylvania’s 2019 Child Care Market Rate Survey. When it was due to be updated and expanded in 2022, he brought in Emma Eglinton ’23, who ultimately got a co-author credit on the report. Eglinton is now studying education policy at the top-ranked University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, where Collins earned his Ph.D.

Collins is also happy to advise students on their own projects: “I love helping people move in the direction they want to go,” he says. “When I have students who express an interest in tackling a question that they’re really curious about, I invite them to sit down and chat about it and think about why that question is interesting to them and what sorts of methods they might use to approach it. We then talk about a plan to work in that direction.”

Collins knew that teaching was his calling as an undergraduate studying physics and engineering, but he started his career as an operations engineer for Lutron Electronics, partly because his best teachers had brought their own industry experience into the classroom. He went on to teach physics, earth science and economics at Southern Lehigh High School, where he also developed new courses in energy and natural hazards.

“It 100% reaffirmed that teaching was what I was supposed to be doing,” he says. “But the limited autonomy in the classroom was not a good fit for my strengths. I wanted to be a part of helping to resolve that.”

That’s why he went to Penn to study education policy; his dissertation, “School District Consolidation and Its Academic and Financial Effects,” integrated his experiences as an operations engineer, which involved considering how organizations delivered a product or service, and as a public school educator. When he was on the job market, Muhlenberg embraced the breadth of his background: “One of the criteria I was hunting for was a position within a higher ed institution that would allow me to teach different things and not be so discipline-focused. I like having variety in my life,” says Collins, who’s in good company at Muhlenberg, a place where students double-majoring in seemingly unrelated disciplines is relatively common. “Other colleges didn’t know what sense to make of that. Muhlenberg’s Business Program not only wasn’t bothered by that, but they loved it.”

This semester, Collins is teaching Operations and Information Systems, Project Management Theory and Practice, and Economics of Education and team-teaching Business Decisions in Sports with Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing Cathy Hessick. He designed a first-year seminar on canals that he taught in 2021 and 2023. He has taught an introductory statistics course in the mathematics department and had conversations with Muhlenberg’s School of Graduate Studies about potential involvement in its new master’s in teaching curriculum. While some of these courses may seem disparate, there’s a common theme.

“Unifying them is a desire to help my students become more comfortable, competent and confident in using data well,” Collins says. “And this is a theme that, no matter what I’m teaching, will come up over and over.”