Four-Day University Teaching and Learning Course, Fall 2015-16

The University Teaching and Learning Course is a four-day program offered to all new professors and on-the-job faculty. For the new comers, this course will prepare you on some important aspects of university teaching and learning, such as lecturing, course design, and assessment and giving feedbacks. For the experience faculty, this course can give you new insights in your teaching and useful advice on current teaching pedagogy to enhance student learning. This course is delivered in a blended-learning format – face-to-face and online delivery.

Registration:

Please contact Miss Elaine Leung at 23586803 or ctfyleung@ust.hk.

Note:

1. All face-to-face sessions will be held in Room 6558 (Lift 27/28)
2. UTL online course materials can be accessed in Canvas, course name: University & College Teaching

   

Day 1

Session 1 & 2: Understanding the Principles of Course Design – Part 1 & 2

Whether or not you are involved in building courses, it is important to learn the principles of good course design to maximize the chance that students have a positive learning experience. These two sessions will explain course design based on the Outcome Based Education approach, which can contribute to your ability to identify the context of your course and its design, so as to enable you to teach it successfully. Methods of assessing learning and giving feedback to student will also touch on.

Day 2

Session 3: Lecturing and Making it More Effective

This session will look into how your personal teaching preference influences students’ learning approaches, and address the crucial question of how to ensure that students do actually learn something from lectures. The aim is to provide useful guidance for the new faculty and a refresher for the more experienced who would like to build their confidence, solve problems and improve their students' learning and satisfaction.

Session 4: Teaching Methods and Active Learning

The session deals with further issues about lecturing, including the value of active learning, interactive teaching methods to increase student engagement during lectures, and other alternative strategies for facilitating active learning.

Day 3

Session 5: Resources to Enhance Student learning

This session aims to answer your questions about how to find, select, and successfully make use of learning resources. There is a range of resources and instructional styles that you can adapt for your teaching but making the appropriate choice, sometimes is difficult. This session will help you to identifying, wisely selecting or creating, and using resources with your students – and then evaluating their effectiveness. At the end, you will be better equipped to enable your students to learn efficiently and effectively.                        

Session 6: Making the Most of Discussion

Discussion involves interaction among all members of a group. The teacher fades into the background and is no longer the center of the classroom. Instead the teacher encourages students to communicate directly with one another and monitors the discussion, providing guidance when it is needed. This session will give you the tips and strategies you need to prepare for, initiate, facilitate, evaluate, and improve discussion experiences, whatever the size and nature of the course you teach.

Day 4

Session 7: Marking and Giving Feedback

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; giving feedback.

Session 8: Developing Your Teaching

This session focuses on your professional growth in teaching. It is based on the premise that you can stay vital in teaching by continuously reflecting on your teaching practice and, through this process, developing new teaching skills and approaches.