Students laud professor's contribution
Online graduate school U21 Global already recognises the achievement of students with its Academic Excellence Awards. This year students got to evaluate the performance of their tutors as the school celebrated its second cohort of graduates by announcing the winners in its inaugural Faculty Excellence Awards.
The awards cover three categories - the outstanding professor, the most innovative professor and the excellence in online education. Assistant professor of marketing, Ken Wong, was a winner in all three categories.
Professor Wong said he was driven by the personal responsibility, feedback and moderate risks his job allowed him. He said teaching MBA students online was challenging because of the different industry and academic background of each student, but he made it a point to raise controversial topics to stimulate their intellectual curiosity, and gave them projects that would challenge them. He said the recognition of his students through the awards encouraged him to continuously deliver 'an exceptional teaching performance'.
Professor Wong was the recipient of the Most Innovative Professor award. He said his students were, in the academic Douglas McGregor's term, 'Theory Y' managers who exercised self-direction and self-control in their online studies.
He strove to create a learning environment that involved participative decision-making and responsible and challenging tasks that motivated the students. 'In one of my e-business classes some tech-savvy students were losing interest in the academic theories discussion while others were having great difficulties in putting the theories into practice, as they are senior managers who rarely have hands-on experience with the actual IT infrastructure,' Professor Wong said.
To revive interest, he asked the students to build a website for their team from scratch, using basic html authoring and file upload tools. 'The technologically-blind students messed up the files in the server but this gave the tech-savvy ones a great opportunity to demonstrate their superior IT skills to fix the issues,' Professor Wong said. 'This small exercise not only fostered teamwork but also stimulated class-wide discussion on topics like server security, business process, workflow management, website design and e-business models, satisfying the learning objectives of the course.'
Professor Wong said his teaching methods were not technically innovative. 'All I have done is to pay attention to the needs of my students and come up with a different approach, often a simple one, to help them master the knowledge in an enjoyable e-learning environment,' he said.