Teaching

Statement of Teaching Philosophy - Feng Liu

The most important key to design my classes is "Student Centered Design". Before each class, I always like to gather the latest information on the web which related to today's topic, write notes of questions from students since last class which need to be discussed in class and step into class with well-prepared content.

In the classroom, First of all, catch student attention by interesting content is important. Second, make student think loud and speak out of their doubts. My classes always open for questions. Interacting with students on questioning and answering is also helping other students who are not brave enough to ask questions. I like observe student reactions of each important point I am repeating. Observing can help to find who got lost, who might have questions. Third, Give examples to help to clear confuses. Giving an examples and designing student as part of the example can help on clarifying the theory and making students learn theories easily in practice. Last, periodically evaluation always helps me to get student's feedbacks and suggestions, which is very important for my course design later.

Beyond classroom, I often assign some papers for students to read, summary and share ideas in classroom. I keep communicate with students by using class discussion board or email. I also encourage students go online and join certain tech discussion forums to question, answer, involve, and updating their knowledge on time.

Beside those, designing good projects is another key point for students to apply class knowledge in practice. For example, I design CSc4720/6720 HCI (Human Computer Interaction) as a project-oriented class. We have total four projects, in the warm-up project, student learning how to observe HCI in the daily life. In second and third projects, they should individually practice the knowledge from class by developing a website step by step while class goes on. And the last project would be team project for simulating the real working environment of user analysis, task analysis, design, prototype and evaluation until it fit to usability, then goes to last step of implementation. During those projects, whole classes act as role of evaluators for each student's works. It opens space for experienced student sharing ideas with non-experience one, and make non-experience students catch up much easier and quicker. We also invited the industrial expert to give an evaluation for the team works.

As a summery, I really enjoyed teaching. I am happy to see my students' improvements. The communication with students is also a good way to keep myself in the cutting edged technology field.