Customer Reviews

Learning to Teach in Higher Education

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This is an excellent text for those wishing to either embark on a career in higher education / adult education or for those wishing to develop their skills in this area.

The book is divided into three major sections: learning and teaching in higher education, design for teaching and evaluating and improving quality.

The first section, learning and teaching in higher education, includes chapters that introduces readers to what is teaching from an adult perspective, how students learn, student centric versus teacher centric learning, and the practice and philosophical approaches to teaching and learning from a higher education perspective.

The second section, design for teaching, covers topics such as course goals and objectives, teaching strategies, and assessment.

The third section, evaluating and improving quality, provides an overview of evaluation and improvement in higher education.

The text book is easy to read, limits the use of jargon, and does not assume that the reader is either a novice or a highly experienced practitioner.

The use of case studies and examples from a number of universities across the world provides the reader with an insight into the issues that face educators in a variety of teaching contexts and across different specializations. My own teaching includes delivering programs in both Australia and China, and even though the student learning styles are diagrammatically opposite, there are methods and strategies within the text that can still be applied in both of these environments.

The book does not provide a prescriptive description of how teaching should be conducted, but it causes the reader to reflect on their own teaching practice and identify alternative options and strategies.

The author, Paul Ramsden, acknowledges that education contexts, environments and cultures do vary, and he provides guidance and advice that can be applied in a multitude of teaching and delivery scenarios.

Overall, I would highly recommend this text to anyone wishing to develop their skills in this area, and to provide it as a useful resource for departments looking at developing professional development for their own faculty.

The book contains a number of points to improve the quality of teaching. It is specifically useful for the PhD students who assist in teaching and the teachers at universities who have 1-3 years experiences in teaching. If the book was written more concisely, it could have got the highest rank in my view.

Learning to teach in higher education by Ramsden is a very good overview to the teaching strategies in the universities. "Teaching is to make students' learning possible" tells quite a lot about this book.