Casual Tutoring in Computing Available at the Australian National University

The School of Computing at the Australian National University has opened applications for casual tutoring for Semester 1 2023.  The School teaches everything from AI and machine learning, systems, software, theory, analytics, to the practicalities of  project management teams (I help with that in Techlauncher). Paid training is provided, & ACT Government staff visit the campus to help with getting your Working With Vulnerable People card.

An Approach to Sessional Teaching Staff

Recently I was asked about an approach to sessional teaching staff at university. These casual staff are called tutors, teaching assistants, or graduate teaching assistants. They may be undergraduate students in the later years of their study, postgraduate students, retired academics, or working professionals who teach part time. I have occasionally carried out this role, studied the topic as a student of teaching and helped train tutors. I have come to the conclusion there is an inherent problem which needs to be solved by universities: university teachers are not required to be qualified to teach. I suggest this could be best solved by offering teacher training as part of degree programs, and would remove many of the problems with recruiting and administering tutors.

Offer teacher training as part of degree programs

University teachers are required to be qualified in the area they are teaching. Tutors who are students are typically at a later stage of their studies than those they teach. Such students make good teachers, as they can relate better to students than someone who has not been a student for decades. However, these tutors typically receive, at most, one day of training in how to teach, and there is not time before classes start to give them more training.

The solution to under-trained tutors, I suggest, is to offer concurrent training as part of their formal degree program. Students who wished to be tutors would be required to enroll in a teaching course as part of their degree, and would undertake this study at the same time they are teaching. Tutors would be required to complete at least a one semester course (one quarter full time study: about 100 hours study). Students would pay the normal course fee for this course and receive credit towards their degree.

Those who are not students would be required to undertake the same teaching course as the students, unless they already had some form of teaching qualification (such as a Cert IV T&A, or a Grad Cert in Educaiton). Those who were not students would not have pay the course fee, but have the option to do so if they wished to receive a certificate of completion, and credit towards further study.


Such a teaching course would be blended, with optional face-to-face classes, and would model good teaching and assessment practices. Much of the value of this would be from experiencing how to teach.

Improving Tutor Training

How much teacher training do those teaching at university need and how should this be provided? This is a question I have been looking at since first becoming involved in teaching at a university twenty years ago. I have been subjected to poorly designed online introductory tutoring course, a better four day face to face course, as well as longer programs. I decided to look at some of my frustrations, and recommendations, so I do not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Online course exemplar: In reflecting on being an online student of teaching, one frustration was in difficulty using the Learning Management System (LMS). In that case I was using one unfamiliar to me (Blackboard). In teaching tutors, who are mostly students, it would therefore help to use the LMS they have been using as students. It would also help to lay out the tutor course using a familiar standard template of courses at the university. The online materials should be an example of good design. One of my frustrations as an online student of education, was where the content of the course said to do something, but that was not followed in the way the course was implemented (a case of "Do as I say, not as I do"). It is especially important that the materials are provided online for a tutor training course, as you only have the students for a short time.

Provide Assessment: As a form of staff training, short tutor training courses are often not assessed, although the student may get a certificate of attendance. There may be some optional assessment offered, if they intend to apply for credit to program, or apply for an external certificate (such as fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, Association for Learning Technology, or the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia). However, I found it difficult to take some teacher training seriously as there was no assessment, and I just needed to turn up. Even if only for the purposes of formative feedback, some type of assessment should be provided. This will also provide the participant with some idea of what it is like for their own students.

Peer Support: As a student I disliked any form of group work. My attitude was that I just wanted to be told what to do, I would do it on my own, and then get out of there. However, this does not make for a satisfying learning experience. New tutors, like new students, need help and support, which they can't just get from supervisors. So forms of group work, peer feedback and assessment, should be built into the tutor training. This may be difficult to arrange, and unpopular, but is useful.

Practical Exercises: Much of the teacher training I have been a student of has been very "academic", with theory expounded by an expert talking to a passive class of students. There is plenty of research to show this is not an effective way to learn. Ironically, some of that evidence was cited by people standing up presenting slide after slide, just as that research said not to do. What I found most useful as a student was to be told a little theory, and then have to prepare a practical lesson, with my peers as students.

Not Intensive Mode: Being crammed into a room for a few hours, or days is not a useful way to learn. There needs to be time to reflect, and ideally try out, what is being learned.

Tutor Training

Principles of Tutoring & Demonstrating" (ANU, 2014):

"Principles of Tutoring and Demonstrating is a decamod in the Academic Professional Development (APD) program. It is a program specifically designed for research students to give a broad introduction to university teaching in the context of tutoring and demonstrating. It runs weekly during semester to provide ongoing support just when tutors and demonstrators may need it. "

This was made up of ten modules:

1. Setting the Scene - Reflective Practice

• Preparing for the first class
• Overview of rights and responsibilities
• Reflective practice
• The Professional Standards Framework and the EFS

2. Setting the Scene: Student Learning

• Student learning styles and how this affects the way we teach
• The role of the teacher - Theories of teaching

3.  Planning a Tutorial

• Theories of student learning and lesson planning
• Structuring a teaching session

4.  Teaching Groups & individuals

• Small group and cooperative learning strategies
• Strategies for engaging with student one-on-one

 5. Dynamics & Diversity

• Dealing with diverse groups of students.
• Responding to challenging situations and "difficult" students
• Notions of group life cycle
• Student needs and support services

 6. Introduction to Wattle* for Tutors

• Tricks and tips for using Wattle to enhance your teaching

 7.  Peer Observation

• Observation of another tutor with reflection online 

 8. Assessment & Marking

 9. Evaluation & Reflective Practice

• Evaluation practices
• Creating a teaching portfolio
• Action learning - evaluation to inform practice
• Personal reflection

10.  Troubleshooting (The Tutoring Toolkit)

• Discussion of teaching scenarios from past semester
• Key skills in a tutor's teaching toolkit

ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS ) offered a Teaching and quality Program (TQP), based on the above.


 * Wattle is ANU's Learning Management System, made up of Moodle and other tools.

Reimagining engineering and computer science tutor training for the 21st Century

I have been asked to help teach engineering and computer science tutors how to tutor. But first, what is the role of the graduates of these disciplines in the 21st century? The College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS) at the Australian National University (ANU) has set out to reimagine engineering and computing for the mid 21st century.

The re-thinking of ANU engine ring and computing includes how to teach them, with Reimagine Co Design Culture Lab this week in Canberra. This includes consecrations of "Transformational education experiences that give a distinctive edge in technological problem formulation, with experience curated from the breadth of engineering, computing, science, social science and humanities". Some of the key aspects of this are creativity, collaboration, and human needs.

For STEM students trained and selected for their skills in narrow technician specializations,  creativity, collaboration and meeting human needs, are a challenge. For teachers who have also been trained in a narrow technical area, how to teach these broader skills, and assess them is also challenge.

The answer I suggest is authentic education and assessment. That is the teaching should be as much like the real workplace as possible. Students are then given a real task and assessed on how well they do it. Hardly anyone spends their days working by sitting silently in a big hall listing to some giving a presentation, so that should not be how they learn. Hardly anyone works by answering written questions on paper, alone, with no reference materials, so that is not how they should be assessed.

University teachers can be trapped in a vicious circle, where they teach using the same poor techniques used to teach them. The problem is that university academics receive little teacher training, and then pass or poor practices to their students. Even when offered more extensive teacher education, academics are busy teaching, or researching. Tutor training, provides an opportunity to break this cycle, by showing the pre-career academic, alternative ways to teach, before they become too busy to lean.

How should I teach university tutors?

I have been asked to help teach engineering and computer science tutors how to tutor. Suggestions, and contributions of syllabus, references, videos, exercises and the like would be most welcome. About half the tutors have some previous experience, half are new. Some are graduate students, some are from industry. We have until February next year to come up with a program, and then two days to teach them. There will be experienced tutor trainers as part of the team, but I am new to this (I have been a tutor and a teacher and trained to teach students, but not train the trainer).

Learning to be a Professional

ANU TechLauncher 2015 team
‘Design Profile’.
Photo by Stuart Hay

For the next few months I will be speaking at conferences, and on industry committees preparing policy, so can't tutor ANU TechLaucher, as I usually do. Instead I volunteered to be a standby tutor, a like Star Trek's Emergency Medical Hologram. Last week the usual tutor was not available, so I took a class for the first time.

It is a little daunting walking into a classroom mid-semester with a room full of experienced students who have bonded into teams. So I decided to treat it like a job application, and put up on screen my LinkedIn profile. The students were not that impressed with my past work, as much of it is from before they were born. However, there were interested in my 700+ contacts, and asked how does someone starting out get these. My answer was that they need to gain experience outside their their course and that will be assessed in their last assignment.

This was a little off topic for the tutorial, which was supposed to be about hearing from them where their projects are up to. However, I pointed out that the Work Portfolio Package, their last assessment item (worth 20%), requires them to write a job application and provide evidence of how professional they are. A large part of being professional is learning to learn, and learning to work with people.

A previous version of ANU Techlauncher required a reflective portfolio, where students commented on their learning. However, this is a very abstract concept to get across to students generally. It is particularly difficult for STEM students to understand the relevance of reflection (it is easier for educators from a social science). I still have difficulty with reflection, even after successfully completing a portfolio for an MEd capstone, for fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and most recently for the ANU Technology-Enhanced Learning in Higher Education Certificate.

For TechLauncher, the reflection was recast as a job application. The student has to explain how their experience during the course is relevant to a real job. This is essentially the same learning reflection exercise, but in a format which is very relevant to a final year student who will soon need a job. What many students have difficulty with is that this is not just about what they learned as part of the course content, but what they sought out to learn externally.

To make the need for reflection explicit, the marking criteria for the portfolio are about the student's professional approach: evidence of decision-making, maturity of reflection,  professional tone,  evidence of life-long learning, acting on feedback and professional attitude.

Of the criteria, evidence of life-long learning, causes the most difficulty. Having been the recipients of carefully curated education for years, students have difficulty with the idea of seeking out learning for themselves. The usually response is "Can we just watch some YouTube videos?". The assumption is that any more structured learning is something where they have to pay someone to tell them what to do.

Students, I suggest, need to be shown how to go out and find learning for themselves. They also need to be told it is okay if this is outside their discipline, provided their is some relevance (such as soft skills). At and around universities there are many learning opportunities, some formal, some informal. What the student needs to do is work out what they want to learn, what is available for that, how they will know they learned something, and in professional terms, what evidence will they have to show an assessor, or employer, that they learned.

At least that is what I tried to get across to the students in the tutorial last week. Just watching some videos what not enough. They had to first work out what they needed to learn, then decide if the videos were suitable, then decide if they had really learned, and lastly provide some documentation of this. As a certified computer professional I am required to do 30 hours of such training per year, with evidence and possible audit of my claims.

Finding extra learning at a university and particularly in a university city such as Canberra, is not that difficult. There are free and low cost courses run by the universities and affiliated bodies, such as the Canberra Innovation Network. There are university clubs and societies, such as the ANU Computer Science Student Association. Student membership of professional bodies, such as the Australian Computer Society and Engineers Australia. provides the opportunity to not only attend events, but also take part in running them. The professional contacts come as a by product of these activities, from meeting people.

Alternatives to University Tutorials and Lectures

Greetings from the Australian National University in Canberra, where I am talking part in "Education Development StudioTeaching & Learning Day: Evolving practice and expectations". John Minns, talked o  Combining forms of teaching delivery. He advocated an approach where lectures are replaced by three hour interactive sessions with the entire class of 300 students. Small group tutorials are still offered in addition, for those students who want them. It seemed to me that the idea of offering different forms of instruction and then allowing students to choose is not a new one, being the traditional OxBridge approach of Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Skills for University Tutors

As part of the Vocational Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, I was required to learn how to prepare Work-based Learning Pathways. At the time I was looking at what training university tutors received, so I prepared a work-based learning pathway for an ANU computer science tutor. This was an interesting exercise in seeing what training was available from the university and if  vocational e-leaning modules could be used to supplement this. Also it was interesting to see if the vocational approach made sense in a university environment. Overall it worked reasonably well.

It would be interesting to see if the training which early career academics (ECAs) receive could be structured in such a way that they receive both a university and vocational qualification. That is the student would receive a Cert IV in Training and Assessment, plus do extra study for a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, so they were qualified to teach in universities and TAFEs.

WORK-BASED LEARNING PATHWAY

Graduate Students Tutoring Undergraduates in Computer Science

Workplace: ANU

Name of employee/s: Graduate Students Tutoring Undergraduates in Computer Science

Learning goals:

• Run tutorial groups and workshops. Administer the course website.
• Maintain student records for the course.
• Assist with teaching in tutorials and workshops. Undertake assessment of assignments

Benchmark/units of competency

• BSBCMM401A - Make a presentation
• TAEDEL401A - Plan, organise and deliver group-based learning
• BSBEBU401A - Review and maintain a website
• TAETAS401A - Maintain training and assessment information
• TAEASS402A Assess competence
• ANU Code of Practice for Teaching and Learning, 1 Jan 2012

Instructions to facilitator: This learning pathway documents the recommended learning pathway for graduate students tutoring undergraduates.

Please note:

1. This will need tailoring for individual tutors. It is expected the graduate students have necessary technical knowledge of computer science topics and be familiar with HTML, but have limited presentation skills and little or no teaching experience.
2. Tutors will need to make a presentation and assist with a tutorial before doing so on their own.

Tutors will need “tutor” access to the Learning Management System.

Development Plan

 

Skills and knowledge to be developed	Learning activity and recommended strategy	Facilitator	Cost	Sequence/ Timeframe	Agreed Completion Dates
Run tutorial groups and workshops.	Attend introductory university on-line course on small group learning. Prepare and present to the group of tutors.	CECS Educational Development Group	3 hours	Day 1	Day 1
Administer the course website.	Read “Introduction to Wattle" (Web Access To Teaching & Learning Environments) Attend “Wattle Course Setup”  Attend ANU “Alliance” workshop.	ANU Library and Central Wattle Training	3.5 Hours	Day 2	Day 2
Maintain student records for the course.	Attend “Student Admin System Training Session"	ANU Division of Registrar & Student Services	3 Hours	Day 3	Day 3
Undertake assessment of assignments	Read “Assessment and examinations” section of ANU website Listen to “Tutors Again” podcast and undertake the exercises Undertake “Assess competence” from the Australian Flexible Learning Toolbox Coaching by experienced tutor.	ANU Academic Skills & Learning Centre	3 Hours	3 Hours	Day 4

Implications for the workplace: Face-to-face workshops may take months to schedule and so would be better if this was organized the semester before the tutor is to start work.

Assessment methods: Student to keep a journal using ANU Mahara e-portfolio system to document learning. Experienced tutor to provide feedback on this.

Support needs: Student will need to be paid 12.5 hours for the training. Experienced tutor will need to be paid to undertake the coaching (3 hours).