About us – Center for Pedagogical Excellence

about us

Office of Teaching & Learning

The Office of Teaching and Learning is in charge of the University’s commitment to providing a student-centred learning experience by exploring, analysing, designing, and developing different tools, methods, and approaches that help create inspiring and impactful learning experiences. We provide critical support to our intellectual community and help them explore pedagogical strategies and approaches that transcend disciplinary boundaries using a broad framework of course design and delivery dubbed as the CPACT model. The Office of Associate Dean of Teaching, and Learning works through the Centre for Pedagogical Excellence and its existing path-breaking facility for human-centred design (the playground), to develop pedagogical techniques that augment the classroom experience.

CPE

CPE (Centre for Pedagogical Excellence) is managed by Office of Associate Dean of Teaching, Learning and Research: The Office of Associate Dean of Teaching, Learning and Research is responsible for overseeing the University’s commitment to explore, analyse, create and develop different tools, methods and approaches to knowledge exchange and ensure that faculty are able to design and deliver educational experiences that transcend a typical course design and delivery using the CPAC Model. The Office of Associate Dean of Teaching, Learning and Research works through both the CPE and its existing path-breaking facility for human-centered design thinking, the playground to develop pedagogical techniques that augment the classroom experience.

CPE is a central pillar of Habib University’s mission. The University’s mission statement serves as a public declaration of the institution’s values and purpose. Centre of Pedagogical Excellence works backstage in ensuring the fulfilment of these institutional commitments. We serve as nuclei for pedagogical innovation and respond to the growing institutional needs and priorities. CPE ensures that the educational and institutional vision of the university are brought to reality.

To serve as an effective change agent that helps the institution in making both teaching and learning accessible in midst of the growing challenges.
Reinforce excellence in teaching and learning.
To foster an environment that helps both the instructors and students to excel.
To improve upon the existing teaching approaches and introduce new instructional methods that ensure maximal and effective yield
To assist faculty members in adopting new and alternative teaching methods that improve the overall learning experience of students.
To provide them the right tools and resources to ensure the aforementioned.
To create a community for faculty members to contribute, take away and collaborate in redesigning their courses.
To facilitate professional correspondence between faculty members.

CPE is committed to a holistic approach to teaching by designing content that connects, adopting pedagogy through a student-centred lens, devising inclusive and outcome-based assessments, building communities that go beyond the classrooms, and encouraging transdisciplinary collaboration. We refer to this framework as CPACT. All programming and support structures are informed by this framework, whether it is faculty development, peer reviews, course evaluations, teaching reflections, or annual teaching excellence awards.

Remote and Online Learning (During and Post Pandemic, Online Future of Habib):
The impact of the pandemic has been enormous throughout the world with over 1.2 billion children losing access to classrooms. In such a scenario, online teaching arose as a substitute that one had to get used to. Online learning has shown some scientific benefits as well like students remembering information better etc. In such a scenario, it is pertinent to think how long lasting the concept of online teaching will remain. Online teaching is not an entirely new phenomenon with aspects of it being adopted even before the pandemic struck. There are so many features utilised in online teaching such as translation tools, group video calls, LMS, etc. Similarly, even before the beginning of the pandemic, Habib University utilised online tools in teaching and with learning from home having been mandated by circumstances, the university sprung into action for a smooth and quick transfer of classes online. In this endeavour, it provided all required training to faculty as well as students. It is noteworthy that these resources were not just one-time training resources rather options available to the Habib community at any time they wished to make use of them. The vision of the university remains to be prepared if such circumstances arise in the future. The transfer should have the capability of being immediate and smooth. This transition, in fact, has made universities deliberate on whether they can make use of some brilliant opportunities presented by online teaching such as more students being given a chance to enroll.

Continuing Learning and Training for External Communities:
- Pedagogical Innovation in Higher Learning:
  Playground is a space, and an ecosystem, designed exclusively for creative collaborative work at Habib University. It serves as a gateway to making and design activities across departments and schools. Through workshops, pop-up classes and industry and community projects participants will be able to learn, and apply their learning, across disciplines and media – from sewing to 3D printing, photography to film, board games to phone apps, wood work to metal work, and beyond.
- Training in Student-Centered Design:
  In designing a learning experience, faculty members sometimes tend to emphasize on the content and lose sight of the people who will go through the experience. To bring the focus back on students, a three-day workshop on Designing Student Centered Learning Experience hosted at the playground, inspired by the workshop conducted at the Olin College. From 9-11 August, the entire faculty of Dhanani School of Science & Engineering at Habib University were in students’ shoes as they participated in specially designed activities and student interviews. The workshop covered tools that instructors can use in designing student-centered learning experiences. Which included teaming, setting project goals, and creating student personas. The workshop turned out being highly experiential and thoroughly enjoyable for the instructors. The Playground will soon organize such workshops for external communities as well so that the scope of its benefit reaches a larger number of people.
Discussing various teaching strategies:
Several different kinds of teaching strategies are discussed to provide students and faculty with many interesting options they can choose from to make learning more interactive and fun as well as making students retain more.
- Visualization:
  The concept of visualization is making the learning something that students can ‘see’ and thus understand from that ‘seeing’. That ‘seeing’ could be incorporated through use of multimedia but even more deeply by taking students as close to real life applications of content being taught.
- Cooperative Learning:
  Sometimes we notice a whole course can end without students in that course having actually interacted with or learnt from each other. The seating style is often reflective of that, with students facing just one person, the instructor. Cooperative learning is a very effective strategy for not just giving students a chance to learn from each other and to share each other’s understanding but it also helps form bonds between them which may help them professionally and personally for a very long time even after the course has culminated.
- Inquiry-based Instruction:
  Inspiring students to come up with innovative queries is an excellent strategy for making them think in different ways and perhaps in ways that few may have thought of before. This may inspire new discoveries, innovations and styles. It is precisely these things that make a university stand out.
- Differentiation:
  Using strategies from educational psychology may assist in knowing which strategies to use with which groups of students. For instance, the method of scaffolding helps in identifying the skills that different students may already have mastery in and then taking it from there, not in a dictatorial manner rather only providing the level of support that is required so that more and more independent learning is fostered. This strategy may be especially useful with struggling students.
- Technology in the Classroom:
  Because of the fast proliferation of technology in society at large and particularly workplaces, it is essential to familiarise students with its use, giving them skills that will also make them competent applicants for jobs. Even apart from preparing students for workplaces, technology has enormous use in methodologies of teaching. With opportunities for resources such as VR being incorporated in classrooms, possibilities become massive for students to immerse in their content in such a way as may never have been imagined before.
- Classroom Management:
  It is also an essential part of the classroom experience to have policies and implementation in place that give all students the right to voice their opinions and to have no one curtail their right by way of disruption or disrespect.
- Professional Development:
  Professional development is something which presents opportunity to faculty to come across solutions to issues that may not have thought of before and ideas to incorporate in their teaching which they may have been unaware of before. All this trickles down as advantage to students resulting in a better classroom experience, one which they remember long after they are out of it. Unique teaching styles distinguish faculty as well as encourage more students to look forward to learning from them.
Learning about software tools that can help improve the teaching experience (both online and in person):
Some faculty may not be very comfortable with online tools that can aid in their teaching. Therefore, they should always be provided an avenue in which they can pick up these skills whenever they desire and no hesitation with proper technology use gets in their way. Not only should such an opportunity always be there for them but they should be actively encouraged to take it up.

Fine tuning your course for improved learning experience:
Moving past passive learning and exerting extra effort to enrich the course experience for students is one of the most important ways to increase engagement and improve the learning experience and outcomes for any given course. CPE promotes a technology savvy model to incorporate active learning in the learning process. Setting up a dialectic of learning activities in which students move back and forth between having rich new experiences and engaging in deep, meaningful dialogue, can maximize the likelihood that the learners will experience significant and meaningful learning.

Creating interdisciplinary courses:
Having an initiative that encourages faculty to cooperate with each other on creating interdisciplinary courses is wonderful because not only does that give the chance for so many to learn from others that have something unique to teach them but it is also emulative of real-life scenarios where disciplines and fields merge all the time to provide useful results.

Content

One of our key goals is to rethink the way we use content in our courses. Most of the time, content becomes the centre around which all experiences are created. This at times can be a flawed approach, especially if the content was not written for the context in which it is being used and also if the students are coming from varied intellectual experiences and backgrounds. By reimagining content in our context, our faculty are able to create intellectual experiences that are deeply embedded in our reality and help the students connect at a deeper level with the ideas being shared. One of the aims of CPE is to have content that emphasizes creativity and research, that can help create leaders practising globally. To nurture such qualities in the Habib community, the content created transcends disciplinary boundaries. When contextualized, the interdisciplinary content allows faculty to use new methodologies to develop skills and lay the foundations for new knowledge. The onboarding program at CPE equips the faculty to apply abstract concepts to the everyday world within their classes, such connections strengthen newly acquired knowledge and increase student engagement with learning activities.

pedagogy

Selecting the right pedagogical approach for any course is a critical element for student success. The traditional chalk and talk style is, in many ways, becoming irrelevant to the changing learning behaviours. Depending on the nature of the course, several teaching styles and approaches can be used within the classroom. This could include an active learning approach, a project-based approach, a flip learning approach, an inquiry-based approach, some traditional chalk and talk, or a mix of many of these methods based on their relevance in the course. Thinking about the right pedagogical approach at the time of course design can greatly increase the impact of the course on the student experience.Learning occurs most effectively when different disciplines come together and work collaboratively towards developing a pedagogy that entails the use and integration of methods and analytical frameworks from more than one academic discipline to examine a theme, issue, question, or topic. At Habib University, we believe that a thorough understanding of today’s real-life problems requires interdisciplinary collaboration not just within the student community but also within the faculty, trained to engage with ideas and peers beyond their discipline of expertise.

Assessment

Whether online or in-person, CPE’s onboarding program uses careful design options to develop assessment options, which are transparent enough to gauge understanding of the learning outcomes in a course. Assessment has consistently been one of the most significant needs identified in several faculty development surveys. Despite the complexity involved in designing and conducting research, the faculty development program at CPE aims to have a cumulative impact on teaching, including improved assignments. CPE provides insights on creating inclusive assessments, encourages learning, is connected to the learning outcomes, is transparent, and provides constant opportunities to create and reflect.

Community

Taking learning beyond the classroom. Imagining a course experience that extends the classroom discussions and inspires knowledge exchange through other platforms or brings people together around ideas, promotes creative and collaborative exchanges.

Transdisciplinarity

It’s natural at Habib to think across and beyond disciplines as isolated learning centered around a single discipline is inevitably stifling and would cease to produce rewarding outcomes beyond a certain point. To ensure a deeper and meaningful understanding of the world around us, it is becoming increasingly integral for there to not only be a collaboration between different disciplines but an integration of perspectives across them. Through this fusion of ideas across, inside and beyond all disciplines, one can hope to move past a structure that sustains on dissemination of static knowledge. Time calls for universities to dissolve the segregation of disciplines, branch out from the conventional setting and produce transdisciplinary thinkers. Such thinkers will be better prepared for the pluralistic and complex world out there.