Good Practices in Teaching and Learning Identified from Common Core Course Cycle Review 2018-19

The Committee on Undergraduate Core Education (CUCE) noted from the Common Core Course Cycle Review exercises the following good practices in teaching and learning from courses in different areas. Through sharing these with the Schools/Departments/Units and placed on the Common Core Program website, Common Core instructors may consider these where appropriate for enhancing the teaching and learning effectiveness in their courses. The letters in brackets indicate the Common Core area of the course from which the practice is identified.

Class Preparation

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  1. Host on canvas, and regularly update, all course materials, including lecture notes, readings, tutorial questions, discussion topics, after-class exercises and solutions. This practice can facilitate students in achieving learning outcomes in a convenient and flexible way. Students can access all course contents anytime, anywhere, even on a mobile phone. (H)
  2. Distribute complete and detailed PPT presentations on canvas ready-made for students which is helpful to engage them. (H)
  3. Present the course content in various ways, including videos, animations, slides and diagrams. Provide reference readings such that students could find useful resources when they encountered difficulties. (S&T)
  4. Use visual materials such as pictures and videos which are useful in explaining the concrete details of the contents. These are welcomed by students. (H)
  5. Use multimedia materials such as animations and short movies to illustrate the concepts. Students found these materials helpful and conducive to their comprehension. (S&T)
  6. Prepare multiple real-life examples to help explain the key concepts. (SA)
  7. Include news and recent research findings in the teaching materials. Daily life examples were also used to illustrate important concepts. These helped students to relate the concepts learnt to their daily life. Students found the course interesting and useful. (S&T)
  8. Prepare hands-on tasks with detailed explanation and steps to help students understand the course materials at tutorial sessions. (SA)

Class Management

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  1. Help students stay concentrated during a relatively long lecture by multiple short breaks, and by in-class discussions, quizzes and frequent PRS interactions which also greatly facilitated students’ learning. (S&T)
  2. Create an interactive class atmosphere and encourage student participation. (SA)

Course Delivery

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  1. Maximize students’ engagement and active learning experience by inviting them to reflect on their own language with real-time examples of language change. (H)
  2. Encourage students to attend fieldtrips where they could link what they had learned in class with their real-world experiences. Students were given bonus points for attending fieldtrips and writing fieldtrip reports. (H) 
  1. Adopt a combination of oral presentation, class discussion, and visual aids to highlight the structure of key ideas to draw students’ attention. (H)
  2. Adopt more interactive mode of teaching and use more pragmatic examples that students can relate to from their daily lives for a diverse groups of audiences. (S&T)
  3. Adopt a teaching mode which is a mixture of interactive lecture, small group tutorial, and student-oriented learning activities. To encourage students’ critical thinking, guest speakers were invited to lecture on specific topics from a new perspective that is very different from the instructor. (H)
  4. Invite industrial professionals to share with students the contemporary business intelligence development and real-life cases which helps students put the theories into practice. (SA)
  5. Provide a brief summary of the materials covered in previous meeting helps students review what they have learned and makes sure they can follow the lectures before moving to new topics. It helps students feel confident in their grasp of the materials, and provides a linkage among different topics to create an overarching theme when discussing a particular
    religion/culture. (H)
  6. Divide a highly diversified class into six groups mixing local and international students based on their aesthetic tastes. In the format of group projects, students were encouraged to form reading and writing groups for presentation, while tutorials will be given to each group one week prior to their presentation. This practice has effectively increased the class dynamics and
    formed a sense of solidarity. (H) 
  1. Encourage students to speak in public – When they speak, they are more motivated to participate in the class and take the class more seriously. They generally do not have many opportunities to speak in public. They appreciate these opportunities in classroom. This will also prepare them better for many jobs and tasks in their future. (SA)
  2. Ask students to present their research project findings in class. The presenter could improve his/her paper by adopting the comments and suggestions from the instructor and classmates. Students could also learn from experiences of their classmates. (H)
  3. Ask students to do presentation on reading materials in tutorials where they not just present the contents, but also invite the class to participate in discussing questions raised. Bonus marks would be given to students who answer the questions from the presenters and engage in the discussion. (H)
  4. Post several discussion topics on an online discussion forum opened for the course to engage students who were shy and did not speak much in class. It is found that students responded enthusiastically. From this online discussion forum, many good students, who, although silent in class, were active online and shared their insightful ideas, were identified. (H)
  5. Use PRS effectively in making the classes more interactive. Students commented that the PRS questions and the self-tests helped them better understand and grasp the concepts. (S&T)
  6. Ask students to compose a few reflective journals throughout the semester. The reflective journals are meant to be highly personal, asking students to reflect on their own experience with identity quest, confusion, struggle or confirmation after having studied a similar journey or experience documented by other important thinker or writer of our time. Students tend to
    be very genuine in their reflective journals, showing their keen interest in engaging in these questions and their growing ability to transfer academic learning into something that is deeply personal and matters to them. I recommend this for many courses regardless the nature of the discipline, as the real value of learning should be helping students see the relevance of their
    academic study with their personal lives, and equipping them with the critical thinking and communication skills to continue to reflect on such relevance for the rest of their lives. (H) 
  1. Provide optional tutorials for students whose backgrounds are weak in key areas before the mid-term test and the final examination. Contact students who are having significant difficulties after the mid-term test to offer assistance. (H)
  2. Meet with project groups out of class to guide students’ choices of approaches, and provide feedback and constructive comments on individual students’ work on intermediate stages of the project. (H)
  3. Be responsive and encouraging to students – explain course materials in details during lecture and be willing to interact with students after classes. (SA) 

Assessment

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  1. Organize bi-weekly lab and quiz assignment to help students better prepare for the examinations. Provide mini in-class quizzes periodically, which were of lower difficulty to students yet serve to test their understanding of the concepts taught. (QR)
  2. Ask students to submit a book review report by week 4 that helps non-major students to have basic understanding of the course materials at the beginning of the course. (H) 
  1. After each assessment (except for the final exam), students’ performance in the assessment is meticulously analyzed, with detailed explanations on common problems and mistakes. The analysis is released on canvas to help students improve in subsequent assessments. (H)
  2. Release the set of exercises and questions for discussion for each tutorial on canvas one week ahead so that students can briefly prepare for the upcoming tutorial. After each tutorial, a solution file with detailed explanations is distributed to students, allowing them to review and reflect on their performance. Similarly, all after-class exercises come with a full set of answers and explanations (released a few days later) to help students improve their performance. (H)