On 25th April, 2018, over 45 academic and RC staff participated in CTLE’s Teaching Innovation Salon. For this special half-day salon, CTLE have invited 7 out of 9 UM Teaching Excellence Award 2017/2018 Nominees from Faculties and Institutes to share their pedagogical practices at UM. The event is held every year and aims to promote teaching excellence. Prof. NI (VRAA) opened the workshop by reminding participants of the central role that good teaching plays at UM and the need for teaching enhancement.

The first session started with a talk by Prof. Tianshu ZHU (FSS), “Why Innovations and Which Methods to Use? – Finding the Innovated Methods for My Classes”. Prof. ZHU’s session provided several new, innovative pedagogical methods used in her art history classes that helped enhance student engagement.

Prof. Man Yin CHIU (FAH) then talked about “Varied Excellences: Reflections on Teaching in a Technological World”. He shared an in-class activity and provided examples to explain how such activity improved class engagement.

Prof. Hui PAN (IAPME) gave some impressive examples of student achievement in his talk “Project-Based Teaching to Stimulate Student’s Passion on Learning”.He introduced project-oriented teaching and four main areas on which this teaching practice focused.

Prof. Matthew LIU (FBA) then presented “Catching Students’ Attention in the Digital Era”. In this session, Prof. LIU inspired the participants by sharing his choice of images and words used in his teaching materials, and how such material enhanced teaching and student’s attention.

The last session was a panel moderated by Prof. Katrine WONG (DCTLE). Prof. Chunming WANG (ICMS), Prof. Bing SHUI (FLL) and Mr. Miguel COSTA (FST) shared with the participants their experiences on teaching. Key issues addressed include incorporation of technology, usage of text-books, students’ expectations vs. educators’ expectations.