From Neophyte to Experienced Facilitator: an Interactive Blended-Learning Course for Graduate Teaching Assistants in Hong Kong

Abstract

Faculty training in tertiary institutions around the world is receiving increasing attention as it plays a significant role to ensure high quality learning and teaching practices in constantly changing multi-cultural education backgrounds. In the case of Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), designing an effective training course to help them deliver content interactively, using student-centered strategies and approaches in a second language (in this case English), becomes critical. Rather than training GTAs in procedural and declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and processes), a shift in emphasis to functioning knowledge, e.g., classroom management techniques, course design, formative and summative peer review, presentation skills, is the focus of this intensive course, which is heavily supported by two educational e-technologies, Echo360 Lecture Capturing System and an asynchronous Discussion Board, hosted under the Blackboard (Bb) Course Management System. Adopting an ethnographic approach in which all the researchers have co-taught this course for at least two years, this paper chronicles the effort of using Echo360 and Bb Discussion Board to support the delivery of course content and assessment tasks that yields reflective practices. Achievement of learning outcomes is evaluated through the use of multiple measures: reflections of course attendees, researchers’ direct observation, and statistics provided by the Learning Management System. Results are very encouraging in terms of significant improvement of graduate students’ presentation skills and self-reflective practices facilitated by Echo360 and Discussion Board.

Keywords

• e-Learning Technologies
• Graduate Teaching Assistants
• Lecture Capture
• Online Discussion Board