Supporting Effective Teaching and Learning

In the previous two posts, we discussed how programs are designed, and how courses within the programs can be designed to provide a high-quality learning for students, leading to graduates with well-developed graduate attributes. While design of the education program, and the courses within the program, indeed form the foundation of good quality education, for their expectations to be realized, they must be executed properly. In other words, courses must be taught effectively leading to good learning as per the course outcomes by the students in the courses. Effective teaching leading to good learning requires extra care to be taken by teachers, and there need to be systems in the university to support and encourage effective teaching. Over the previous decades, there has been a sharper focus on effectiveness in teaching which leads to the desired learning. The NEP also suggests importance of universities to give attention to the teaching-learning processes to improve the learning outcomes of students.

Any system to deliver high quality output requires not only the people involved in the execution to perform their tasks as expected, but also needs feedback and quality systems to maintain and improve the quality – the law of entropy will ensure that if effort is not spent in properly administering the education delivery system, it is likely to decline in quality. There are a number of approaches universities can employ to improve the quality of teaching – here we discuss some approaches which universities can employ to help improve teaching, based on experience at IIIT-Delhi.

Training for Teaching

Teaching and learning at the university level has been an active area of research for a few decades. Many traits and practices have been identified of excellent teachers, and of effective teaching. While some people may naturally have talents to be an effective teacher, it is now clear that there are some methodologies (e.g. active learning, project-based learning, etc.) that facilitate learning which instructors can learn and apply. It is also now clear that for a teacher to be effective, he must have decent understanding about students’ learning processes and styles, and student motivation, besides understanding the principles of course design and basics of teaching.

Even if the faculty member has knowledge about the course, it is essential that faculty be trained in methods and technologies for effective teaching. While a few decades ago this was not appreciated, this is now widely accepted, and most large universities have established teaching and learning or teaching excellence centers. These centers, besides doing research in effective teaching and learning, offer training programs for faculty on becoming a more effective teacher.

As the importance of high-quality teaching is also increasing, and many universities value teachers that are recognized as good, certificates programs on teaching have also evolved. Faculty development programs for improving teaching effectiveness have been generally found to be quite effective. Often the centers within the university may offer certificates. But there are also externally offered programs on this (one such program for teaching the teachers on effective teaching for Computer Science is the CSEDU program in India.)

Feedback Loops for Improving

Feedback loops are central to improvement of any system – indeed even maintaining the current level of quality requires feedback and continuous adjustment. For improving the teaching there needs to be systematic feedback loops and actions taken based on the feedback for improving learning. There are multiple purposes for such feedbacks. For teachers teaching a course feedback can help understand if they are proceeding as they planned, and that the teaching approach, speed, etc. is suitable for the current set of students. Feedback is also needed for the overall course, as course design cannot be static and its design cannot be assumed to be optimal – only with feedback can the design be improved – to either address deficiencies in design or to accommodate newer developments. Even the design of the program cannot be assumed to be optimal, and should not be static – hence feedback is needed on the program. Finally, the teaching learning methods being employed by faculty can always do with improvement – so feedback to understand the effectiveness of the approaches used by different teachers will help.

There are some many feedback instruments universities use – for example, end of the course feedback from students is a standard in most universities. For different types of feedback, different approaches or questionnaires may be used. Here we discuss the methods used in IIIT-Delhi for different purposes using structured questionnaires (with some open-ended questions) – they are likely to be similar in spirit and style to approaches used elsewhere.

• Peer review of course design. Most standard courses in a program will have a design specifying the learning objectives, syllabus, and assessment plan – the design would have been finalized through a process of discussion and review. However, it is desirable to provide some flexibility to instructors to adjust the topics covered, the assessment approach, etc., since even for a standard course, some amount of evolution is desirable. If flexibility is provided to the instructor to modify the course design, it is desirable to ensure that changes are appropriate, and that the plan for course delivery by the instructor is sound in that it will deliver the learning outcomes and will assess them well. Given the autonomy and responsibility granted to the faculty for administering and running their courses – a freedom that is desirable and aligns with the faculty ethos – any approach for this has to be consistent with this ethos. Peer review of course plans is the feedback loop that attempts to achieve a balance. In peer review, the plan for a course by an instructor is reviewed by a peer (or a group of peers). The review comments are not meant to be an official record and are only given to the instructor. The institute only ensures that peer-review has taken place, and so a record that it has been conducted is to be submitted. As it is review by peers, it is a constructive exercise of improvement, with no threat of it becoming an assessment.

• Mid-semester feedback. The usual end of semester feedback on courses (discussed below), as collected after the course has finished, can only be used for improving the future offerings of the course and is of little value to the student enrolled in the course. To get feedback on the current course offering so any adjustments that may be needed can be made, an early mid-semester feedback instrument is employed – this is an online survey of students about a few key aspects of the course: the pace, the difficulty, ability to understand, and anything else the instructor may want to ask. The goal of this is to provide the instructor feedback on the current course teaching, so she can adjust it suitably, based on the inputs. This feedback is not an administrative instrument in that the results are not recorded or used for assessment – it is meant exclusively for the instructor and to help her adjust the course. So, only the instructor receives the feedback, which she is expected to summarize to the class and the actions she plans to take, if any.

• End of Semester feedback. Most universities have end of semester feedback for courses. The main purpose of this feedback is to assess the quality of learning achieved by the student, the quality of teaching by the instructor (as perceived by the student), and get suggestions for improvement. Experience suggests that it is best to ask students precise questions that they can answer, rather than asking them summative questions (like: how good was the instructor, or how much learning did you have). Hence, it is desirable to have a set of questions regarding teaching, and a set of questions regarding the course and learning, and the student feedback on these be combined into aggregate scores to assess teaching and learning. Student evaluation of teaching has been found to be reliable and stable and useful for improving teaching effectiveness.

• Course summary. Student feedback, it is known, is not an accurate reflection of the level of learning or the quality of teaching. Students are often biased and let other factors color their replies. As is the general wisdom, that while student feedback is an important input, it has inherent limitations. To address this and get a holistic view of the course, for each course a course summary is prepared by the instructor and the teaching assistants. This summary also provides information about any special efforts and initiatives employed by the instructor to improve learning, any tools used, any other special practice, etc. This short summary provides the instructor’s view about teaching.  The information in this summary, when combined with the student feedback, can provide better insight on what are the practices that may be helping in students’ learning. This can be used to determine “good practices” and “teaching innovations” that faculty colleagues have employed that seem to be helping in making teaching more effective. These can then be shared with other faculty as “lessons learned” – these can help transmit the effective practices more widely.

• Feedback from graduating students, alumni, recruiters. To get a broader student perspective, a feedback can be taken from students at graduation time. These students have a full perspective of the education program, and also have a sense of what helped them during their job interviews or their graduate studies applications. The focus of this feedback is more on overall program and learning experience (as well as other aspects of student life), and what can be done to improve it. Unlike other feedbacks which focus on a course, this is a more comprehensive feedback and taken once a year – inputs from this can help in deciding changes in the overall program.

In addition to these, feedback can be taken from the recruiters about the strengths and weaknesses they observe in the students. These inputs provide valuable feedback from employment perspective. However, it should be recognized that this perspective is often too narrow and focused on the objectives of the organization for which recruitment is being done. Hence such feedback cannot be taken literally, and any changes that may be suggested from these feedbacks must be supported by other needs and arguments.

Recognizing and Rewarding Teaching Excellence

Faculty members will often align their efforts towards what is perceived as valued by the Institution and their profession. In quest for research excellence, balance between teaching and research is sometimes lost in favor of research. There are some concerns that teaching has not been valued sufficiently by some universities. Given the importance of teaching, there is a need to ensure that the message that teaching is important is communicated to the faculty. And along with it a message needs to be given to the students that teaching excellence is their right and not a favor by the highly accomplished faculty.

There are established methods by professional bodies and societies to recognize and reward research excellence. There are prestigious awards, which often also have a financial incentive, to recognize great contributions in research. There are also prestigious fellowships established by professional bodies and societies which recognize research excellence. And, of course, there are research funding schemes which provide grants for good research. Research contributions also get recognized through citations, invited seminars, keynotes, etc. All in all, there are many ways in which contribution to research is rewarded and recognized.

On the other hand, such channels are very few for teaching excellence. There is a fundamental challenge in this also – while research output is in public domain which the professional community of peers can assess and so can judge if the contributions over the years are worthy of recognition, such approaches are generally not possible for teaching excellence. Teaching is visible only within the university, and that too largely to students (and indirectly through their feedback and inputs to others). Hence, it is hard for professional bodies to establish teaching excellence recognition and awards. Consequently, for recognizing teaching excellence, the university itself will have to identify and recognize it – something it does not have to do for research excellence, where it can rely on professional bodies. Recognizing teaching excellence through awards and prizes are now widely practiced in universities.

There will clearly be many ways to identify teaching excellence. Whatever method is employed, it must involve inputs from the students, as teaching is finally about learning by students. Here we briefly describe two schemes that are used in many universities, including IIIT-Delhi.

As hundreds of courses are taught each semester in a university, and feedback is taken in each of the courses, one approach to recognizing good teaching is to recognize and reward instructors based exclusively on the student feedback on courses. Such recognition can be given to the “top few” instructors in each discipline. For recognizing the top few, besides the feedback from students, other information can also be incorporated in the selection process – for example, size of the course, difficulty level of the course, innovations tried in the course (which are captured in course summaries), student comments, etc. This method has a drawback that it relies too much on the student feedback, which is known to be not completely impartial.

A sounder approach can be to identify teaching excellence by taking inputs from the graduating students and/or the recent alumni. These groups of students have seen the entire program and a range of teachers and hence are in a better position to identify those teachers who they consider as having done the best job of helping them learn. These students also should also not have any “hidden agenda”, as they will not be taking any more courses and will not be facing the faculty in future. One approach for identifying recipients for teaching excellence awards as decided by graduating batch (and/or alumni) is to have a process of nomination by the students, followed by subsequent voting. (This is the approach followed at IIIT-Delhi.) This method of recognizing teaching excellence has the drawback that as people tend to remember recent courses more, instructors of courses taught towards the end of the program are likely to have an advantage. This can be alleviated by having separate categories for awards – some for the foundation courses, some for the core or compulsory courses, some for electives, etc.

Another way to respect and promote teaching excellence is to have workshops for sharing “good practices” internally in the university. Recipients of teaching excellence awards, or those faculty who are trying some innovations in their teaching, can be invited to share their experiences and what they do with others. These workshops not only help in disseminate the good practices, they also help message that teaching excellence matters, and for respecting those who have been recognized as excellent teachers. It also supports bottom-up innovation in teaching which has been argued as an appropriate way to motivate and improve teaching and learning, with the workshops providing the platform to connect and share effective innovations and strategies across different disciplines. These can also provide inputs for top-down policy making regarding teaching excellence, as well as for refining the modules that teaching excellence center offers to faculty.