UGC Teaching Awardee’s Way to Move A Class Away From A Soporific Monologue

“Moving away from a soporific monologue to interactive dialogue,” described Dr. Michael Botelho, the dentistry instructor in HKU and awardee of the UGC Teaching Award, about how he has practiced the flipped classroom pedagogy in a teaching seminar today. Invited by the Centre of Learning Enhancement and Research of CUHK, he shared his way to flip his classroom which encouraged active learning and peer support.

Dr. Botelho’s approach is to make it student-centered and interactive. His students, after watching teaching videos as required before class, need to complete a worksheet where answers come from both the pre-class videos and in-class discussions. The problem-oriented worksheet guides students through the classroom content and creates a focus for a discussion-based small group learning, eventually helping students to check and explore actively their understanding of the knowledge covered.

Other than pre-class videos, Dr. Botelho also uploads after-class Q&A records that he names as Communal Consultation Videos for students’ self-learning. In his past survey findings, 83% of the students had paused the videos to think of their own answer and 92% of the students had situated themselves in the question situation to determine the appropriate clinical judgement, which both were signs of active learning.

To make a flipped classroom more effective, Dr. Botelho suggested delving into the video analytics so as to review the engagement brought by each video. He also requires his students to participate in classroom discussions instead of using mobile phones to ensure that there are no distractions in the learning process.

The sharing, titled “Synchronous and Asynchronous Support for Students Learning – Use of the Flipped Class Technique and Dialogic Videos”, was held in CUHK this morning. Around 50 teachers and eLearning practitioners from local universities participated in the event.