HIS MANY YEARS IN education have caused Professor John Biggs to witness not just the rapid expansion of higher education in Britain, Hong Kong and his home country of Australia, but also the need for change in teaching and learning methods.
The traditional lecture and tutorial may have worked well when university classes were filled with the highly selected and academically-oriented, Professor Biggs wrote in his 1999 book Teaching for Quality Learning at University, now heading for its third edition.
He believes new teaching and assessment methods are needed with the rising number of university students with mixed abilities and levels of motivation. Rather than being lecture-based, university teaching today should comprise various activities, along with assessment tasks that can reflect how well students have mastered the skills they are supposed to have, or the pre-defined discipline-specific learning outcomes. This belief underlies the Outcomes-based Teaching and Learning (OBTL) project recently launched at City University of Hong Kong, of which Professor Biggs is the principal consultant.
'Students construct knowledge on the basis of the learning activities they undergo,' he said.
Professor Biggs, who taught at University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Education between the late 1980s and mid-90s, pointed out in his book: 'Good teaching is getting most students to use the higher cognitive level processes that the more academic students use spontaneously.'
Professor Biggs described his move to Hong Kong as fruitful. He worked on the approaches to learning of Chinese students in an attempt to explain their success in international studies of academic achievement, resulting in his formulation of the so-called 'Paradox of the Chinese Learner'.
