University Teaching and Learning Course – Spring 2019

Any effective teaching must begin with a consideration of how students learn. When it comes to teaching, you could base your teaching approaches on personal experience, opinion, habit or your colleagues’ advice - but these approaches may not be ideal if your goal is to be an effective teacher. Understanding the science of learning can improve your teaching and help you address some common classroom challenges, such as why can’t students engage in my class? Why do students continue to apply the same ineffective learning strategies? What can I do to help students apply what they have learned? This session aims to introduce research-based learning theory coupled with practical tips to improve your teaching.

This module will explain course design based on an Outcome Based Education (OBE) approach, which emphasizes the importance of establishing clear learning outcomes, then design teaching and learning activities and assessment tasks that align with those intended learning outcomes. The session identify the key components of an effective course design and help you applying OBE in your own context. Bring along a course outline that you would like to create the course intended learning outcomes for.

The process of marking, grading and giving feedback is crucial: it is the most powerful lever teachers have to orient students' study efforts towards the most important things in the most appropriate ways. Students will pay most attention to what they think is being assessed – so, in this session we will look in more detail at the implications of key areas such as: setting assessment tasks; specifying outcome criteria; helping students self-review; and giving feedback.

A rubric is a grading guide that explicitly communicates the expectations for an assignment by listing a coherent set of criteria and clearly describing levels of performance quality for these criteria. Rubrics are often used for written assignments; project work; group/team work; peer evaluations; and oral presentations. This session will help you learn about what a rubric is and how to design an effective rubric for assessment tasks. Bring to the session an assignment or assessment for which you would like to create a rubric for.

Keeping students captivated and ready to learn is not an easy task. It required both careful planning and skilful facilitation. This module will introduce some handy and interactive student engagement techniques that can help you keeping students motivated, no matter in what class size.

Having students work in groups/ teams is effective in helping them to apply concepts, rather than simply learn about them. Working with peers enables students to pool ideas, see problems from different perspectives and benefit from analyzing, discussing and exploring their own ideas and gain feedback from their peers. This module will look into how to facilitate student learning in (1) teams where they need to work together on a project for an extended period and (2) ad-hoc groups that are formed during class where they need to work cooperatively to accomplish some learning goals within a class session.