Supporting colleagues’ professional development and strengthening the position as thought leaders – Interview with Dr. Susan Bridges, Director of the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, the University of Hong Kong

Supporting colleagues’ professional development and strengthening the position as thought leaders – Interview with Dr. Susan Bridges, Director of the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, the University of Hong Kong

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University teaching and learning is facing unprecedented challenges this year in a global pandemic. Dr. Susan Bridges, Director of the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), assumed her directorship in July 2020, a critical period during which teaching and learning was being reshaped and colleagues required additional support for their teaching.

This article presents a conversation with Dr. Bridges who shares her vision for the Centre and plans for supporting colleagues’ professional development in teaching and learning. She also outlines strategies for leading the Centre to continue playing an influential role regionally and globally.

Tracy: What is your vision for CETL and how would you lead the Centre to achieve the vision?

Susan: In such a challenging time with so many ‘wicked problems’, my immediate goals on taking up the post in July 2020 were for the Centre to rapidly scale up support for colleagues in the area of online course re-designing and to address their emerging professional development needs. To achieve these, it has been important to be proactive and pre-emptive and to work closely with my Assistant Directors, Drs Chan and Fryer in expanding both our programmes and seminars while widening access to consultations with CETL academics.

Before I took up the directorship, the University had already experienced what has been termed ‘emergency remote teaching’ as a rapid pivot to online learning in late 2019 and then again after only a short return to campus in Semester 2, 2020 (Hodges et al., 2020). During that time, as academic lead of the E-Learning Team in the Faculty of Education, I was familiar with the emerging challenges and local and international responses with innovative practices. In forward planning for CETL, we knew the University’s plan for September-December in 2020 was to hold three-weeks of online learning followed by, if possible, a partial return to campus with hybrid (dual-mode) teaching and learning. To support colleagues in their course re-designs, my first initiative was to draw on the expertise of colleagues in CETL to assemble a Summer Sandbox Series on ‘Creative Online Course Designing’ (https://www.cetl.hku.hk/sandbox2020/) targeted at course coordinators who were key to the online shift. We adopted the term and imagery of a ‘sandbox’ and the verb ‘designing’ to emphasise that it was a creative, reflective and dynamic space for ideas generation and co-planning. The Sandbox Series, though not compulsory, had strong, sustained uptake and enabled us to be slightly ahead of the game in terms of providing professional development that focussed on forward planning.

Tracy: You assumed directorship in a critical time in the middle of a global pandemic. What have your experiences been as Director in the past several months?

Susan: Similar to many centres of teaching and learning worldwide, we experienced a distinct phase as our role became more prominent in terms of assisting our colleagues in adapting to the rapidly evolving higher education landscape. Through sharing expertise and resources with colleagues, I also experienced a strong, collaborative spirit, an esprit de corps at all levels both within HKU and across networks. In October and November alone, I contributed seven invited talks across sectors and countries. A live-streamed event via Facebook to thousands of higher education academics and students in Pakistan early in my directorship was a notable example of how sectors were responding to the need to share and learn from others rapidly and at scale. Clearly, people have been looking to CETL and HKU for advice as we have looked to others, especially colleagues with expertise in distance education. Significant to our role is acting as a conduit to disseminate innovations by HKU colleagues and facilitate sharing of best practices to inspire others and build professional learning communities.

Certainly, our professional development activities in the past several months have increased greatly in terms of frequency and intensity, pointing us to the importance of resources sharing with a capital ‘R’. As CETL colleagues have been rapidly reviewing research and updating on best practices globally to prepare for events and refine our own courses, we have curated and disseminated a wide range of teaching resources. Indeed, a recent white paper compiled by a Canadian research group indicated that a major action undertaken by all teaching and learning centres was “publicly sharing an abundance of resources to support faculty and students during the online transition” (Université Laval & Concordia University, 2020, p.4). To provide a sense of how significant this has been, our CETL website recorded 1.5 million hits over the 2.5 month period between August and November, 2020. We also consider that open sharing of our recorded seminars and resources (https://www.cetl.hku.hk/resources/), specifically those for ‘Online course designing’ (https://www.cetl.hku.hk/designolc/ and ‘Dual-mode teaching’ (https://www.cetl.hku.hk/dualmode/) is critical to our position as Asia’s Global University.

Tracy: What do you see as the future of teaching and learning in higher education?

Susan: I see the future of teaching and learning as blended where we find a principled balance between face-to-face and online, synchronous and asynchronous learning often in hybrid designs. In the 2019 Position Paper arising from our hosting of the 2018 Universitas 21 Educational Innovation Leadership Symposium, the collective wisdom of our international group had envisioned that future undergraduate teaching and learning would emphasize integrated, inquiry-based, collaborative pedagogic designs facilitated through dialogic approaches to blended learning (Bridges, Armour, et al. 2019). One important lesson learned from the Covid-19 experience is that we have to rethink why students come to the physical campus and to identify how best to capitalise on those precious face-to-face interactions for student learning. In this online period, most of us recognise that human interaction, making social connections, and providing equitable access to resources are essential to building productive learning communities.

Moreover, the global pandemic has also pushed higher education to be more open and globally connected. In our recent virtual conference on internationalisation and student mobility (https://www.cetl.hku.hk/vconf2020/), we took the opportunity to re-think internationalisation, given the current restraints on staff and student mobility. Our transnational sharing of ideas for new forms of internationalisation illustrated its potential for transforming higher education through creating different but yet closer connections between people, institutions, and countries.

Tracy: In what ways would you enable CETL to play a leading role in teaching and learning enhancement regionally and globally?

Susan: We have been playing a leading role and have the opportunity to further strengthen our position as thought leaders and innovators in higher education. The Education 4.0 series (https://www.cetl.hku.hk/edu4/) is a brilliant example of this. Dr Cecilia Chan set this in place before I arrived and it played a critical role over the summer by connecting us with the right people at the right time and helping us to learn from academics across the globe. This and our other online seminar series have drawn literally thousands of participants and provided a forum for global leadership with key support and contributions from our own President, Professor Zhang and our PVC (Teaching and Learning), Professor Holliday. CETL will continue connecting with other centres of teaching and learning and with higher education policy leaders internationally. I also feel we can work more closely with our own higher education researchers across faculties to leverage expertise within and across our university.

We are also supporting colleagues to build on lessons learnt to refine their teaching for the future. We might also need to think deeply about things that we have taken for granted. For example, have we fully utilised our Learning Management System at HKU? Are our assessment practices still fit-for-purpose? What types of learning spaces, course designs and pedagogies should we adopt to meet our students’ learning needs?

As we plan forwards, we can draw on the expertise of our researchers who are investigating these and other aspects of higher education. We are supporting our PVC, Professor Holliday as he formulates HKU’s new teaching and learning strategy and have already joined him in fourteen Town Hall meetings over the past months. My own research and experience with inquiry-based, blended learning and integrated programme designs is an area where I hope to contribute. Additionally, we will be supporting HKU’s preparations for the Quality Assurance Council’s (QAC) third audit cycle.

As dedicated mentors and facilitators of student learning, we know why we teach! Central to CETL’s mission, and particularly at this moment in history, is to continue our role in supporting colleagues’ professional development at HKU. We aim to embrace this golden opportunity to not only adapt to change but to fundamentally reconsider the when, where and how of teaching and learning in higher education.

References

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