Putting the Focus on Teaching

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USPCASE supports center faculty in building their pedagogy toolkits

A key focus area for USPCASE is pedagogy: improving course delivery methods and assessing the outcomes in the teaching and learning environment.

Engineering curricula needs constant adjustment to maximize alignment to the needs of society and industry. In addition to their content focus, engineering programs, especially at the master’s and doctoral levels, should provide learning contexts for engineers to become excellent designers, problem-solvers, critical thinkers, team members and leaders. Active learning methodologies, including project-based learning (PjBL) and problem-based learning (PBL), can help to ensure the desired outcomes. These methods also align with the needs and expectations of today’s students.

ASU is working with USPCASE faculty at NUST and UET Peshawar to deepen their understanding of active learning approaches and benefits, to increase the use of active learning approaches in their instruction, and to better improve their use of these approaches to achieve desired outcomes. Part of this focus is to embrace the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), not only to improve instruction but also as an additional outlet for scholarship, creating a sustainable drive towards constant innovation. Faculty attendance at a SoTL conference in fall 2018 helped achieve this goal.

With support from ASU, faculty from the current exchange cohort from NUST and UET-P attended the Conference of the International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning, in Tempe, Arizona on October 10-13, 2018. There, they learned methods for improving their instruction, ways to conduct research on teaching approaches, and how this research can lead to scholarly endeavors in the form of presentations and publications.

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“The key lesson learned during the conference was that it is very important to highlight the novel teaching practices among stakeholders (faculty, admin, students) in order to improve the student’s learning.

The faculty while supervising interdisciplinary projects should also focus on the thinking process of the students rather than ensuring the success of the overall project.

Multi-sensory (sight, touch, sound, smell, taste) experience combined with digital stories is necessary to enhance the learning experience of the students.”

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“The conference provided a comprehensive insight to state-of-the-art teaching methodologies. It has enabled me to learn from experiences of faculty from diverse backgrounds.

The sessions were highly interactive and most of the presentations were complemented by involvement from the audience. The sessions drew our attention to issues faced by faculty, students and administration in an intuitive manner and provided a vision of a highly functioning knowledge enterprise.

I am positive and will try to incorporate these lessons while working at USPCASE-NUST.”

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