Teaching Philosophy

There are three ways that students learn in the classroom: hearing and seeing material presented by the instructor, interaction with other students, and doing individual activities. Traditional lecture pedagogy emphasizes the former, with the instructor making knowledge available that is then consumed by the students. There have been many alternate pedagogies developed in the last decades shifting the emphasis towards peer or individual learning in the classroom. Although there has been debate as to which methods are best, our belief is that all three approaches are very important in the classroom, and our implementation of Tutored Video Instruction builds on all three.

Tutored Video Instruction

In the Tutored Video Instruction (TVI) model, lecture content is captured on video (in this case at the University of Washington), and replayed in class (in this case, at Beihang University). Since the slides and the digital ink are very important for classes such as algorithms, the replay system shows the slides and ink in high resolution, with only a small video of the instructor. A TA will be present at the Beihang classes to facilitate and encourage discussion amongst students, and to administer and discuss activities that will be done by students in class, using tablet PCs.

Facilitation Guidelines

A key aspect of the success of TVI lies in the student discussion around the video materials. This is an example of peer instruction, and there are a number of aspects of discussion between peers that support learning. The exchange of ideas between peers can be more impactful than the often one-way discourse from instructor to student, since shared difficulties and misconceptions provide camaraderie and a common basis for discussion. Equally beneficial is the process of articulating a question or an answer: this allows students to reinforce and test their understanding.

A major role of the facilitator for a tutored video instruction session is to encourage this student discussion. The ideal case is for students to spontaneously ask questions while the lecture is playing, in which case the facilitator stops the video, and other students answer the questions. We would like to have a broad range of students both asking and answering the questions, and in order for this to happen, it is important that the facilitator encourage students to ask questions, and that they encourage students to answer each others' questions. There will be cases where it is more appropriate for the facilitator to directly answer students' questions - this is acceptable, but should not be the common case.

The facilitator should acquaint himself or herself with the materials before the lecture to be aware of points in the lecture that are likely to elicit discussion or confusion. In doing this, it is important to know what to look for, ie: When should questions be asked, and what types of questions should be asked? There are different types of questions that will arise. Since the students for this class are all Chinese speakers, and the instructional materials are in English, some questions will relate to the instructor's use of language and idiom. There will also be questions about terminology. It is important that these questions are asked, because the instructor will be using terminology for an American classroom, and will not be familiar with the background of the students. For this reason, if the language or terminology is not clear, this must be remedied as early as possible. There will be also be cases where the instructor says the wrong thing, which will confuse the local audience as well, so these points should be easier to identify from the video.

Questions that are asked in a live class should also be asked in the TVI sessions. These should be answered through a discussion amongst the students. For this reason, when students ask questions on the recording, it should be stopped to support a local discussion of the question and the answer. It may be difficult to hear the student questions in the recording-the instructor will make an effort to repeat student questions before answering them.

The UW instructor will try to generate discussion in his live class by asking the students questions. The TVI audience should attempt to answer these questions before listening to the answers provided on the recorded lecture.

If the facilitator feels that the students are not asking enough questions, he or she may stop the materials at regular intervals for student questions and discussion.

Active Learning

The University of Washington course includes active learning through the use of networked tablet PCs for classroom activities. These will also beused in the Beihang class.

When a classroom activity is reached in the lecture, the facilitator should stop the video when the students start to work on the activity.At this point the Beihang students should do the classroom activity on the tablet PCs, and submit their answers to the facilitator. The facilitator should then play the role of the instructor, showing the solutions that have been received to the class, and discussing the answers that have been provided. The choice of which student submissions to display is not random: this is dictated by the instructor's intended purpose for the activity. The instructor will provide the facilitators with "activity summaries" to convey this purpose and to guide the facilitator's choice of submissions and their discussion. The solutions from the UW students will also be available in case the submissions from the Beihang students do not demonstrate the desired points (there is certainly no need to display these solutions if the desired points can be made using local submissions). It might be possible to skip the UW instructor's discussion of the student submissions as well, if the same points have come out of the local discussion.

There will be some lectures where classroom activities are given tothe Beihang students but not to the UW students. This will occur when the instructor just asks the UW students for verbal response, but classroom activity slides are made available to the Beihang students to provide structure for discussion.These will be handled in the same way as above, where the facilitator stops the video for the activity and discussion phases.