Teaching context and philosophy

Teaching context and philosophy

I would rather narrate 'teaching philosophy' as 'philosophy of learning'. The pivotal point of my teaching has been to instil the thirst and drive among students for effective learning. As an educator and active researcher in my field, my focus is to deliver authentic teaching by pursuing real-life and practical knowledge to diversified students. Inarguably, my research involvement in the discipline of 'Decision Analytics', 'Applied Operations Research', 'Systems Engineering & Project Management' aids me to expose knowledge gaps in the body of knowledge. Whilst, my main role as an educator has been to augment the 'critical thinking skill' among students to bridge those gaps. If I compare myself as a teacher on what I was 10 years ago and where I am now, I feel the main evolution on me has been on the way I'm perceiving student's learning and foreseeing their needs. The journey towards 'pedagogy'-focused educator to 'pedagogy and personability'-focused educator has been the cogent part of my so far teaching career.   

Contemplating on the dynamicity of interactions between tutelage and personifications, my teaching strategy has been very flexible to match the expectation. My usual inclination towards teaching is to give student's enough context to educate themselves, give them the freedom to ask questions, encourage constructive feedback, and engage peer-to-peer learning for creating a 'community of Inquiry (COI)'. In an Engineering sense, I would name this as 'autonomous learning', while I encourage each student to be a pedagogue for himself and for his cohorts. Thus, I invigorate bi-directional teaching and learning, while students can also teach a teacher by sharing their insightful comments and feedback.  

As an Industrial & Production Engineering (IPE) graduate in this Industry 4.0 era (digitalisation focused), my strong aspiration on teaching has been to promulgate the advancement of Industry-focused Engineering skills (aka, decision-making skills) among the new generation students. A PhD in Computer Science (Optimisation focused) has further widened my skill to see Industrial Engineering from a digitalized sense, which somehow put me in a unique position to teach the new generation about 'how to take real-time & spontaneous decisions in a complex and dynamic situation'. 

  1. Bank on such skill, I have been actively engaging myself in new 'curriculum designs' for brand new system engineering, project management and decision analytics courses. I have been designing both summative and formative assessment types for those courses, while student should have enough exposure to see what is going on in the real industry. In that process, one key take for the student should be to see 'where and how' their academic skill can be applied to practice. 
  2. Introducing interactive learning (e.g., MindTap resources) within the Moodle page. This one-click away MindTap resource has all the relevant contents needed for a student, along with many other real-time features, such as, making comments to the convenor, highlighting paragraphs, linking videos, and listening to recorded audios. The effectiveness of learning from such an initiative can easily be judged by the high '%agreement score' in the MyExperience report.
  3. Managing and monitoring a number of other online activities/technologies on the Moodle page, such a: Padlet, H5P, Gizmo (Keypath’s web-based library) and Dolly (Keypath’s web-based library). These advanced technologies have been giving fantastic opportunities to the students to gauge their learning during completing weekly activities. 
  4. Incorporation of work-based or work-integrated learning in at least one major assessment type.
  5. Adding assignment component named ‘Online participation and Engagement’ to ensure ‘community of learning’. I have established three observable types of interaction (social, cognitive and teaching) that contribute to the development of an authentic, self-sustaining discussion-based online learning community. Discussion forums emphasise the social aspects of learning, asking learners to share knowledge, ideas and experiences with peers, scaffolding social presence throughout the course.