Mr Edward Li
Our course is team-taught by 11 instructors so coordination is essential. Delivery modes vary among different instructors so autonomy needs to be given to the individual instructors. At the same time we also need to have centralized control on the macro principles and structure. Thus a balance has to be maintained between autonomy and centralization."
Suggestions for Your First Large Class
It is important to communicate to students on teaching and learning objectives at the beginning. Make the instructions clear to the students especially when you are using technology, such as online evaluation, in our case. This includes letting the students know the reason behind, and how you want to enhance the effectiveness of using technology to teach. For team-teaching, be prepared that teaching methodologies can have slight variations among different individuals. Allow individual differernces on delivery methods but maintain coherence at the macro level.Language Center
Course:
LANG201 Business Communication (689 students in 38 sections)
Format of Weekly Meetings:
- Two 1.5-hour sessions
Preparing Materials
One part of the course is business simulation. The materials are provided by the business firms and the scenarios are extracted from an authentic context. It comes as an organized and coherent series and the teaching team uses these authentic materials in their class to simulate a real life experience for the students.
Training TAs
He does not work with TAs. Rather, he coordinates a group of instructors for team-teaching. Being the main coordinator, he sets the scheme of work, coordinates on the administrative as well as pedagogical matters with the instructors.
Managing Class
A large part of the course activities are conducted on WebCT. Students have to evaluate each other's performance on the web while instructors have to track the progress of students. Instructors have been relying more and more on WebCT as a communicating tool on information dissemination other than using it for peer evaluation. It has also helped to ease administrative complications to a great extent.
Teaching Strategies
His team uses team-teaching strategies. For instance, they further divide their team into 2 sub-teams for convenient administration. They share teaching ideas constantly to assure quality. To make the system work more effectively, good coordination is needed so the two coordinators keep reviewing and evaluating the operation of the course and identify areas of improvement.
Communication
Communications both among the instructors themselves and between instructors and students are important. For internal communication among the instructors, the coordinators send regular messages to the teaching team to keep them updated on administrative and teaching matters. For instructor-student communication, they rely both on the WebCT discussion forum and constant face-to-face meetings. A variety of tasks are designed and students are encouraged to participate. Besides this, the instructors also have face-to-face meetings with them to discuss their language problems. The students always need to carry out the assigned tasks (contacting business firms, drafting correspondences, etc.) in English so they approach the instructors to seek consultation on issues like language style. He and his team try to keep a good student-teacher relationship.
Assessment
They believe letting students evaluate each other can help them acquire better interpersonal skills, so they adopt peer evaluation which counts 10% toward the total mark. This peer evaluation is conducted online. On standardizing the marks, he believes there is a need to resolve the discrepancies among the instructors' grading. So they meet regularly to reach an agreement on the sample scripts and trial mark students' scripts.
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