Thermoelectric symposium - A renowned research

The Symposium on Thermoelectric was organised and held at Monash University Sunway Campus. Three renowned researchers in this field including Professor Liben Jiang, Professor Ong Kok Seng and Miss Meng Git were the invited speakers for this half day symposium. The response for this symposium was very good, with participants attending coming from places as far as Johor and Penang. During these talks, the speakers remain good contact with participants by introducing their research and the importance as well as their applications in the real world.

Providing currency in teaching is one of the challenges educators face, as they have to keep in touch with day to day news. Innovations in teaching can include inviting renowned researchers or people from the industry who can provide a different view on the unit taught which reflects the real world. This inherently overcomes the problem of lack of currency in teaching as well. With invited guest lecturers, this will definitely increase students' interest in the unit taught, as they now have a clearer picture as to where this knowledge will lead them in their future.

Lifelong learning - Is it measurable now?

Every semester, I am asked to provide a seminar to the final year project (FYP) students. This seminar is entitled "Data error and analysis" which is targeted mainly at students who carry out their research by experiments. This seminar provides student with an idea of how they should analyse all the data they capture from their experimental work and to make a sound conclusion at the end of the research. In this seminar, I outlined the objective of the seminar at the start, and then used my tablet PC and showed the analysis methods step by step. Many examples were also employed and hands on by students were then carried out with a set of given data. Being a lecturer myself and having several FYP students, I was greatly delighted when these students applied the data error and analysis method that I've taught them the previous semester. With this, I knew that what I had taught in the previous semester was effective and kept in mind.

One of the main issues in higher education is measuring the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer from the educator to students. In most universities, learning outcomes are identified in unit guides of the subjects in black and white, while continuous assessments as well as final exam papers are set to align with these learning outcomes. Although this gives a general idea of how much students have captured during that 12 week period, this system still does not measure other graduate attributes such as lifelong learning. How can we teach and provide for such that the knowledge is embedded in them? How do we measure this at time of teaching?

OBE - teaching approach

When I first joined Monash University, I had no idea what OBE meant, and how important it was. Second day at work, and I had to undergo the gruelling EAC accreditation interview, which I was totally clueless about.

Nonetheless, being more than a year at Monash now, the understanding of OBE or Outcome Based Education is now clearer to me..having attended a training on OBE (as well as countless number of meetings), I am now not only more familiar with this term, but can also apply this to my units taught.
The full day training attended which was organised by the Institute of Engineers Malaysia, involved mainly on OBE fundamentals, definitions and how to set the exam papers to meet the learning outcomes of the unit. The speaker also showcased the creativity and dedication of university lecturers who have demonstrated excellence in their teaching endeavours.

Although this was a full-day training, the speaker was capable of holding our concentration span throughout the day with his teaching approaches, which included having breaks in between lectures, providing videos and pictures as well as discussion among participants. This is a main issue in today's higher education teaching. Students are easily distracted, especially in long hour classes which therefore requires a high level of creativity and innovation in educators' teaching today. Due to the nature and importance of the training, the number of participants were also considerably high. This is another issue in today's higher education teaching which sees a large number of students in one class. When the number of students is large, the variability in students' learning styles also vary highly. Again, we see that a high level of innovation in teaching is required in order to capture the numerous learning styles.