The Yegiora Files

Over the years, the call for doing more practical activities outside of the classroom has increased at the tertiary level of education. A good number of students have developed the view that talking and reading about theories does not give them a practical sense of how the various theories are applied in the real world.  Students have formally through the online unit evaluation mentioned the need for more practical placements, internship programs and excursions. For example, a student who evaluated a unit of mine said; "Theories would be much better and understandable if engaged with practical part of it" . Another said; "Knowledge without practical is useless" . The Graduate Tracer Study 2020 Formal Report also shared similar views by former students. A male participant said the University should; "Encourage practical learning for students and work placements for students in the work place" . A female participant said; "Engage students practically i...

In this blog, I will briefly discuss the second teaching and learning strategy I used to teach a full-time undergraduate unit fully online in the second semester due to the COVID19 pandemic. In the first semester, I used the student-led seminar strategy as mentioned in my previous blog. In the second semester, I used a traditional strategy but infused again the usage of Zoom. For the unit IR409 Foreign Policy in PNG offered in the second semester, instead of the traditional face-to-face lectures and tutorial discussions, I decided to organize 2 different online webinar series. One series featured practitioners in the the area of foreign policy while the other featured the students. This formed the synchronous part of the unit.  We do not have a lot of books or journal articles written about our foreign policy or international relations. Many of the publications are out of date or not useful for students who want to know what the government is doing currently. As such, I have n...

In this blog article, I will share with you a snippet of my emergency remote teaching and learning experience. I have been experimenting with the blended learning approach for over 5 years, the move to delivering fully online a full-time undergraduate unit was a new and interesting experiment. I will continue my experiment in order to determine which online teaching and learning strategy is effective.  Apart from the traditional classroom lectures and tutorials, academic staff members have been using Moodle as a learning management system to share documents on our unit webpages using the resource modules, submit assessments via the various activity modules, and collate assessments using the Gradebook function. This fusion is an integral part of the blended learning approach. I teach a maximum of 3 full-time undergraduate units per semester with a class population of between 30 to 40 students for each unit. That means a total of between 95 to 120 students per semester. The 3 units...