In the higher education teacher-training landscape, Universities usually offer professional development training to the faculty members regularly throughout the year. However, the training program offered for postgraduate teaching assistants or tutors is typically a few days of workshops that will cover the essential topics in handling their teaching duties. To make it worse, most of these postgraduate students came from a non-educational background.
Recognizing the importance research postgraduate teaching assistants, or GTA in HKUST context, in improving the quality of the post-lecture learning, HKUST adopts a flipped and more comprehensive teaching approach to address the gap in the current program, open up a new perspective in the delivery of content and materials for GTA, and enhance intercultural teaching competence by unveiling the opportunity, complexity, and challenges when catering to the diverse needs of their UG students.
In this case study, we will look into the evaluation of the Graduate Teaching Assistant Training Program using the "First Principles of Instruction" by David Merrill. This study aims to identify (1) what are the challenges and gaps in the current mode of delivery, (2) what are the active learning strategies needed to engage the students, and (3) what are the considerations made by the instructor in selecting appropriate technologies. Finally, we look through the various changes in the program structure to align with the current situation in Hong Kong, and how the teaching team integrated and solved these issues using various technologies needed to augment the gaps identified by the first five principles.
