Lessons Learned in University Lecturing

During last six months I’ve been teaching Master students in the University of Northampton. However, I was appointed to modules including risk management, project management and business research to train students utilizing my transferable skills, but It’s been more a wonderful learning experience through which I have achieved a lot. Apart from working alongside experienced, knowledgeable and helpful persons such as Tony Bellott, MBA, FCILT , Omoruyi Elaho,PhD, MSc,FHEA , and Emmanuel, I have been able to apply my ideas in classes as well. Hence, I thought it might be valuable to share my lessons learnt with others about this precious journey.

1)?????Previously I have heard, and I have been told a lot that being a university lecturer is more of an individual work in which you must use all your capacity to convey your desired knowledge and information to the students. Unlike this mindset, here at the University of Northampton I experienced something quite different. For instance, in our “Project Management Fundamental” I have been part of a team in which we have pre-semester, post-semester and weekly meetings to share our experience within the classes, review the material together and come up with new ideas to help the students on their learning path. This ritual is established based on the Tony Bellott, MBA, FCILT leadership style and pragmatic mindset alongside contributions of all those colleagues who works on this module like Basheer, Sam, Og and Debbie. It makes me feel like we are all working in a dynamic, ever evolving project.

2)?????The other positive experience was about applying various ideas in classroom to keep the students engaged and active. Student engagement is always an essential value in all the teaching and training setting, but in such contexts in which you work with a diverse cohort of international students with different educational and professional background there should be a variety of tools and solutions for enhancing students’ engagement. The fact is that even if we have bunch of ideas, they would not be applicable as long as we don’t have two things available: adequate and true support from immediate management team; and appropriate infrastructure. Something that has been perfectly provided by Business System and Operation Department management team including Dilshad Sarwar , Dr Patrice Seuwou PhD, SFHEA and Amin Hosseinian-Far . Having this privilege here besides university opportunities for staff development and technology provision, I have tried different ways in my classes. Using interactive and sometimes fun quizzes with the help of services like #Wooclab, #Mentimeter and #H5P is one case by which I kept students’ interest to participate in discussions.

The other case was utilizing games in the class which a simplest but very capable one was #Pennygame through which I have demonstrated agile mindset and values to the students and it genuinely paid off.

I have had also some other cases which really added value to my work experience and hopefully I will write about them at the right time. For now, I would like to appreciate all my colleagues’ collaboration, help and support.

#lessonslearned , #lecturer , #projectmanagement , #studentengagement , #Universityofnorthampton, #university