CELT Newsletter, Fall 2000

Abstract

[evdate 2000-09-15] Center for Enhanced Learning & Teaching 教學促進中心 eCELT issue 2 (Fall 2000) Introduction eCELT, the online newsletter of CELT, brings you the latest update on the development of our center and programs. In this issue of eCELT, Grace will report on the 'new look' of CELT and her plan for the coming year. You will also find out more about the development of the various programs, activities and services for our four target groups: UST Faculty and Instructors UST Teaching Assistants UST Students Primary and Secondary Schoolteachers We will also introduce to you some new members to our CELT team since the last issue. Home | CELT | Programs | Site Map | Contact Us Last modified: undefined Copyright 2000-2008 by CELT, HKUST All rights reserved Director's Report. A New Look of CELT You may wonder why a new center like ours has undergone such major 'renovation' of our Web site shortly after our first launch last September. As with most 'startups', we have had an expeditious growth in moving towards a 'P2P model' (Path-to- Plentiful vs. Path-to-Profitability), finding out what we can and cannot do, and getting the right people to 'realize' this model! Is CELT an evaluation center? An online course manufacturer? A pure TA training house? A potential selffinanced center that lives on TDG grants and QEFs? Or should CELT be a traditional teaching development cost center that hires a group of PhDs in Education to deliver avant-garde teaching skills courses for our faculty members and instructors? If none of the above images sounds too legitimate to you, I'm relieved! My experience as a faculty member in HKUST Business School has given me some practical hints on how to work with faculty members, what their needs are and what they like and dislike. And my being at the then Public Affairs Office has helped me understand how the administrative side of the University functions. But perhaps the most value I have added to CELT is my experience with students - who have always been my inspiration and driving force in creating new initiatives for this University, regardless of my role in teaching, research or administration. What we believe We at CELT believe teaching is an ongoing learning process. The cognitive and intellectual abilities of our students are constantly influenced by the changes in the social, cultural, economical and political climate of our society as well as more importantly, the advent of technology in recent years. Similarly, we as teachers are also affected by these factors. I'm sure you would agree with me that a good teacher is almost unquestionably a good learner. In order to attain a high level of satisfaction in teaching and learning, both teachers and students have to work together. And we unequivocally hope CELT can become the erudite ground for good teachers who strive to learn and explore ways to create enriching experiences in helping their students learn, and for students who want to improve their learning skills. I am neither an expert in the field of teaching development nor a meticulous senior administrator in a public organization and so I do not have a 200-page DIY (Do-It- Yourself) manual outlining the 1099 quality assurance steps that will lead you to a teaching excellence award. WhatI have is the sincerity in working together with you, supporting your vision in teaching innovation, encouraging your passion for continuous improvement and sharing your care for students, to create and archive memories that we'll take pride in telling our peers and lessons that we can learn from one another. Highlights of our programs What you will find in the new CELT's Web site is an online presentation of our center's objectives, approach to teaching and learning and communication channels. You're most welcome to drop by and take a look. It will only take about 5 minutes (excluding the time for installing the plugin if you do not have one). We're also pleased to announce the birth of an e-learning portal called IDEAS on Online Teaching and Learning (OTL), which is designed to support instructors' professional development in teaching enhancement. The portal provides on-line seminars and workshops, startup kits to help instructors jumpstart their choice of instructional methods or technologies, lists of useful resources, as well as on-line discussion forums for instructors to exchange their teaching experiences and ideas with their peers. CELT plans to further expand the implementation of IDEAS to include other important topics in instructional development such as problem-based learning, cooperative learning and action learning. With funding from UGC's Teaching Development Grant, CELT manages to offer Web-based teaching support for over 80 courses in the University since last academic year. We hope we will be able to generate more interests in the University community to explore the effective use of the Web to support teaching and enhance students' learning, as well as encouraging peer learning via sharing of experiences and discussions amongst faculty members and instructors. We also had a successful New TA Orientation and Induction Program in Fall 2000. Most of us who participated in the event were deeply impressed by the high energy level of the TAs and the TACs in making the event not only effective, but also fun. The IT2000 training program for schoolteachers were also successfully implemented. Although funding from QEF was ceased in Nov 1999, around 600 teachers received IT training from CELT as of August 2000 in a cost-recovery manner. On the students' front, we are also planning for a new series of learning enhancement workshops to help students to develop creativity, thinking and leadership and mentoring skills. The good response from our students to the two General Education courses (GNED002 The Creative Process and GNED004 Multimedia Communication Skills for Internet Applications) offered by CELT this semester has been encouraging. We now have about 90 students enrolled in these two courses and we plan to double the enrollment size of these courses in the next semester. To help students develop their facilitation and mentoring skills, CELT has recently became the Hong Kong National Partner of ThinkQuest, the largest international Internet -based education program and spearhead its local development to further benefit the local education community. If you are interested to find out more about our programs, activities and plans, please visit our Web site at http://celt. ust.hk or contact us directly at 2358-6811. Bon Voyage! Home | CELT | Programs | Site Map | Contact Us Last modified: undefined Copyright 2000-2008 by CELT, HKUST All rights reserved Updates & Highlights For UST Instructors For UST Teaching Assistants For UST Students For Schoolteachers Home | CELT | Programs | Site Map | Contact Us Last modified: undefined Copyright 2000-2008 by CELT, HKUST All rights reserved Updates & Highlights for UST Instructors 1. e-Orientation 2. IDEAS-OLT Portal 3. Good Teaching Practices Dissemination 4. Web-enhanced teaching 5. Developing On-Line Courses 6. Teaching Evaluation 1. e-Orientation This is a newly developed online orientation for faculty and instructors who are new to teaching at UST or would like to get a general overview of our Center. Grace will take you through an introduction of CELT and her staff who will be supporting the programs and activities. back to top 2. IDEAS-OLT Portal Developed by our Instructional Design Team, IDEASOLT Portal provides latest information on Instructional Development Experiences, Applications and Solutions on Online Learning and Teaching. back to top 3. Good Teaching Practices Dissemination In an effort to enhancement of teaching practices at UST, CELT is planning on a series of events and activities to disseminate good teaching practices and develop a sharing and collaboration sprit amongst the faculty/instructor of the University. Past Teaching Award winners will be invited to share their excellent teaching experiences to be compiled and published in our Teaching Tips. Conferences and exhibitions will be organized on disseminating the accomplishments of the Teaching Development Grant (TDG) projects to the public. back to top 4. Web-enhanced teaching With funding from UGC's Teaching Development Grant and in collaboration with 4 different Schools and the Language Center, CELT launched a project entitled 'University-Wide Web-Based Course Delivery Platform' in November 1999. The main aim of the project is to promote and explore the effective use of the Web to support teaching and enhance students' learning. A Project Monitoring Committee composing of the principal supervisor (Director of CELT), co-supervisors (4 associate Deans) and a representative from the Language Center was formed to oversee the project. The group has so far met twice. About 80 courses and learning aids of various levels of sophistication have been developed using either one of the two course delivery platforms, WebCT and LearningSpace. Below is a breakdown by platforms and models. Model 1: the web is mainly used for information dissemination. Model 2: the course attempts to use the web to enhance student learning. Model 3: the web becomes the predominant medium where learning takes place. Model 4: the course is conducted in distance learning mode through the web. As of Oct, 2000 LearningSpace WebCT Others Model 1 1 72 Model 2 7 15 1 Model 3 2 Model 4 1 Unclassified 2 Total 9 87 5 As for WISDOM, instructors can create courses using the system without the intervention of the project staff. There are over 150 courses kept at the system. It was designed to be a simple and easy system for instructors to make use of the web, mainly for course management purposes. 11 workshop sessions on how to use WebCT, WISDOM and LearningSpace were held, involving a total of about 130 participants. 4 sessions on WebCT and one on LearningSpace were held involving about 35 students. Two experience sharing sessions among instructors have been conducted. For more about Web-based Teaching Program, please visit our website. back to top 5. Developing On-Line Courses The Instructional Design team has been working closely with the Teaching Technologies team and the Creative Production team to develop multimedia-rich online course materials with faculty and instructors over the past few months. Some of them are being offered in this semester: COMP101, COMP102, COMP361, COMP 362 for the Dept of Computer Science BISC002 for the Dept of Biology ISMT 101, ISMT337 for the Dept of Information and Systems Management CIVL524, CIVL323 for the Dept of Civil Engineering MGTO222 for the Dept of Management of Organizations LANG306 for the Language Center The Instructional Design team is also calling for proposals for on-line course content development in November 2000 and will be rolling out a Do-ityourself (DIY) workshops on 'How to develop your first web-enhanced course' in Winter session 2000- 2001. Watch out of the latest information on the IDEAS-OLT Portal. back to top 6. Teaching Evaluation Since Fall 1998, the web-based system COSSET has been used to collect teaching evaluation data from students. In the course evaluation exercise in Spring 2000, a total of 960 lecture-based sections were evaluated, together with 53 laboratory sections and 79 tutorial sections. A summary of the course evaluation results can be seen at the VPAAO website - http://www.ust.hk/~webaa/courseval/. For more about On-line Teaching Evaluation, please visit our website. back to top Home | CELT | Programs | Site Map | Contact Us Last modified: undefined Copyright 2000-2008 by CELT, HKUST All rights reserved Updates & Highlights for UST Teaching Assistants CELT and TA Coordinators' Committee (TACC) launched the NEW TA Orientation and Induction program in Fall 2000 and it was an exciting experience for all new TAs and even for CELT as well. Some 250 TAs (including local & international TAs) from the four schools/divisions participated in the TA Orientation on 28 August 2000. For CELT and a group of innovative TA Coordinators, the focus of the TA Program is qualities, content, training effectiveness, and most important of all - FUN!. We want to ensure that new PGs will learn effectively in a cheerful atmosphere. To avoid information overloaded to the new PGs, the program was designed on a 'need to know'' basis. Activities were organized to facilitate experience sharing amongst 'new' and 'old' TAs. UST has a unique tradition in TA support. Schools/ departments nominated experienced TAs to be departmental TA Coordinators to as student leaders and provide steady sources of individual advice, guidance and support to their peers on how to deal with various unforeseeable difficulties that can arise in the real classroom setting. The TACs also work as a group to formulate working objectives and organize activities for the purpose of the teaching and learning enhancement at UST. In the academic year of 1999-2000 The TAC committee established five taskforces, each focusing on a particular project: TA Orientation Day, TA Certificate of Achievement Presentation ceremony, TA evaluation, TA training workshops, producing a video documenting best practices for TAs, TA resources WebPages update More skill-oriented workshops will be organized in the Spring Semester 2000 to help TAs reflect on their work and pick up new skills. Home | CELT | Programs | Site Map | Contact Us Last modified: undefined Copyright 2000-2008 by CELT, HKUST All rights reserved Updates & Highlights for UST Students In the area of learning enhancement for UST and secondary school students, CELT has several initiatives for the coming year to help students to develop creativity, thinking and leadership and mentoring skills. 1. General Education Courses Beginning Fall term 2000, GNED002 The Creative Process and GNED004 Multimedia Communication Skills for Internet Applications are being offered for enrollment. GNED003 Art and Technology will be offered in Spring term 2001. These GNED courses are designed to encourage students to discover their creativity and provide them with an opportunity to share and express their creative ideas through various art forms. 2. CELT as National Partner for ThinkQuest Program CELT will also take up a leading role in driving ThinkQuest Internet Challenge, the largest and fastest-growing Internet-based education program in the world, in Hong Kong. Secondary school students are challenged to build information rich web-based resources to be placed in the ThinkQuest library. Teachers and university students are encouraged to be coaches to ensure the relevance and quality of the resources. CELT will organize a series of coaches' workshops on facilitation and mentoring skills for project-based learning. Home | CELT | Programs | Site Map | Contact Us Last modified: undefined Copyright 2000-2008 by CELT, HKUST All rights reserved Updates & Highlights for Schoolteachers In the area of learning enhancement for UST and secondary school students, CELT has several initiatives for the coming year to help students to develop creativity, thinking and leadership and mentoring skills. 1. IT 2000 - A Training Program for Schoolteachers 2. On-going Quality Education Fund Projects 3. Certificate Programs 1. IT 2000 - A Training Program for Schoolteachers This is a newly developed program in CELT based on our experience and success of the Teaching Learning Program (TLP) supported by the Quality Education Fund (QEF). IT 2000 aimed to provide structured information technology training for primary and secondary school teachers with emphasis on instructional technology. Under IT 2000, CELT offered IT Training workshops and School-based IT Training Program to primary and secondary schools.. IT training workshops were designed for teachers with reference to the Education Department's IT Competency Guidelines. Around 200 teachers from 68 primary and secondary school were trained in over 30 workshops. CELT also tailor-made series IT training for schools interested in the use of IT in teaching and learning. Up to 10 schools involving around 400 teachers participated in the School-Based Program. back to top 2. On-going Quality Education Fund Projects On-line Mathematics Education in Secondary Schools: An Exploratory Study Promotion of Environment Protection Awareness in Quality Education Effective Learning in English Pronunciation via Speech Recognition Technology Teaching Integrated Science with a Question-oriented Approach Visit our website for more details about these projects. back to top 3. Certificate Programs CELT, in collaboration with HKUST College of Lifelong Learning, plans to offer 4 certificate courses in assisting schools to incorporate technologies in learning and teaching. Certificate course will be offered in the following areas: E-Learning Strategies -learning Technologies Multimedia Courseware Design Technology Management For details about the Certificate Programs, please visit our website. back to top Home | CELT | Programs | Site Map | Contact Us Last modified: undefined Copyright 2000-2008 by CELT, HKUST All rights reserved