Eastern University, Sri Lanka
Staff Development Centre

Induction Programme for Academic Staff members
(Certificate in Teaching and related Initial Practices (CTrIP) in Higher Education)

 

• What is CTrIP in HE?

The ‘Certificate in Teaching and related Initial Practices (acronym: CTrIP) in Higher Education’ requires you to learn and practice teaching methods so that students in Sri Lankan universities can benefit optimally from their Higher Education experience. Although the process of learning has similarities in various countries, the inputs and requirements for the Sri Lankan situation may well be different and need to be evaluated regularly taking many factors into consideration.

Most of these factors and their impacts will be discussed as you progress through the course so that you can evaluate your own students in your classrooms and apply appropriate teaching methods. As you know already, in your teaching role, you will teach relevant subject material to your students, usually in the content areas in which you already have, or hope to further develop, your specialist knowledge.

• Why you need to follow CTrIP in HE?

H. Kohl (1977) wrote: “No one starts out teaching well” (p.30)

This course is therefore designed to ‘train’ you to change teaching methods to gain and maintain student engagement and interest while teaching your subject, because students are hopeful, interested and attentive when they do begin their university studies. In order to encourage you to ‘do’ such teaching changes, the course tutors will not only ‘tell’ you how teaching can be changed, but will also ‘show’ you how it is done by conducting this course in ways that interactive teaching is showcased in its classroom ‘delivery’. In this way, by ‘seeing’ the possibilities of interactive or student-centered teaching that will keep YOU engaged, you too will be encouraged to adopt it as part of your own teaching methods. This means that teaching is a ‘skill’ that can be developed in you and can be done in several ways. We will use several such ways to develop your teaching skill.

One of these is by tutors of this course demonstrating to you interactive teaching. As this course is delivered by several tutors (also called ‘Resource Persons’), you will be fortunate to witness a variety of teaching delivery methods they employ.

Apart from teaching, the other area that you will be called upon to engage in, while being an academic, includes work outside your role in student teaching and is to do with work related to research, administrative and other practices in the Sri Lankan university system.

This, therefore, is the other content area that would be covered in this CTrIP course, to initiate building your ‘knowledge’ to carry out your non-teaching role as an academic within the Sri Lankan university system when you activate these roles later: for example, when you proceed to post-graduate research studies.

You will also note that the development of ethical practices forms part of this course. For example, it is ethically unacceptable for any participant to discourage peers from achieving the highest potential through this course. This ‘cooperating’ to support each other is a 21st Century skill you are expected to develop in this course, and then later, in your students.

The Teaching and Learning Activities (TLAs) of this course have been re-designed, so that, if you participate and engage in these interactive course activities, you will become a skilled teacher of which Sri Lanka can be justly proud of, simply because these methods are as yet practiced in our universities only by a few lecturers.

We are confident that you will join this growing number of committed academics who, notwithstanding numerous resistances they encounter, contribute to the development of our youth.

In this way, in this course, you will first be introduced to tools and methods that will develop your skill to decide what ‘levels’ of learning are available when you teach your subject to students and then give you skills in methods you could appropriately use to target, plan and develop the different learning levels that are desired.

• The aims of the course are to
  1. assist you, as a new member of the teaching staff in the University, to adapt and adjust to your new role as a teacher, as specified in the UGC approved Training Manual on the Induction Program for Academic Staff of Sri Lankan Universities.
  2. support you in exploring and developing methods and techniques of teaching, learning and assessment that would be appropriate to the settings in which you find yourself to meet current HE needs in Sri Lanka
  3. Provide you with initial knowledge on University administration, counselling and research practices for use in your university career.

• What the Course is about and its structure?

The ‘content’ in this course follow areas laid down by the University Grants Commission (UGC) in their Training Manual, as the requirements for the Induction Program that you are required to complete to pass your probationary period. In this course, these have been organised in an appropriate sequence to facilitate your optimum development, based on international best training practices that the authors have been fortunate to have experienced as well as used in several countries such as Sri Lanka, UK, USA, Hong Kong etc.

This UGC Training Manual titled “Induction Program for Academic Staff of Sri Lankan Universities”dated February 2012 can be accessed at Training manual on induction programme for academic staff of Sri Lankan Universities.pdf (accessed: 26th August 2019)

Academics following the CTrIP will accordingly learn the content set down in the ten modules specified in the UGC Training Manual, which are (see p 4 of UGC Training Manual for the Induction Program);

• Module 1: Orientation as a University Teacher
• Module 2: Personal Development and Counselling
• Module 3: Teaching and Learning Methods
• Module 4: Assessment and Evaluation
• Module 5: Curriculum Design and Revision
• Module 6: ICT skills in Higher Education
• Module 7: Teaching Practice
• Module 8: Research in Higher Education
• Module 9: University Administrative Procedures
• Module 10: Strategic Planning and Management for Universities

In the CTrIP Course, the contents of the above Modules have been extracted from the above-mentioned UGC Training Manual and then arranged for purposes of effective skill development and content delivery. Thus, this CTrIP course deals with components positioned as;

• • 1. Teaching, Learning and Assessment areas, together with practices for their improvement
    2. University administration, counselling and research areas

Component ‘A’ is closely related to a teaching and learning linked ‘practical skill set’. This component is aligned mostly to areas of Modules 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 of the UGC Training Manual.

Component ‘B’, in contrast, has a strong bias towards developing your ‘knowledge’ on administration linked processes and systems in the university and is aligned mostly to content of Modules 1, 2, 8, 9 and 10 of that Manual.

In this CTrIP Course, each of the above-named components is divided into units so that the entire course has 7 interlinked Units, with these units being addressed in twenty (20) Sessions during the course. Each session runs from 08:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The breakdown of the course into these 2 components, 7 units are shown in Table 1.

                                  Table 1. Course Structure

Content area in the UGC Training Manual	CTrIP Course location where UGC Training Manual content is addressed
	CTrIP Course component	CTrIP Unit
Modules 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7	A) Teaching, Learning and Assessment areas together with practices for their improvement	I. Introduction, Preparing to Teach & Preparing for Personal Development
		II. Strategies, Models & Theories to improve Learning
		III. Teaching Methods (including ICT)
		IV. Feedback & teaching in specific disciplines (e.g. Medicine)
		VII. Seminar Presentations
Modules 1, 2, 8, 9, 10	B) University administration, counselling and research practices	V. The University as a System, Addressing Change, Academic & Administrative Procedures
		VI. Ethics, Academic & Administrative procedures
FINAL SUBMISSION: It will be your Course Portfolio, linking all the above components to be submitted as a spiral-bound hard copy and as a CD, by the announced date.

As you go through this course you will come to realise that subject topics/areas can be taught, and then ‘learnt’(by your students), to different ‘levels’ and, more importantly, that it is the use of different teaching methods that you use which would bring about such different levels of learning in your students, related closely to student engagement.

The Teaching and Learning Activities (TLAs) of this course have been re-designed, so that, if you participate and engage in these interactive course activities, you will become a skilled teacher of which Sri Lanka can be justly proud of, simply because these methods are as yet practiced in our universities only by a few lecturers. We are confident that you will join this growing number of committed academics who, notwithstanding numerous resistances they encounter, contribute to the development of our youth.

In this way, in this course, you will first be introduced to tools and methods that will develop your skill to decide what ‘levels’ of learning are available when you teach your subject to students and then give you skills in methods you could appropriately use to target, plan and develop the different learning levels that are desired.

• Acknowledgement:

This course of Certificate in Teaching and related Initial Practices (CTrIP) in Higher Education has been redesigned by Professor Suke Ekaratne, Former Director / Staff Development Centre, University of Colombo.