Changing with the times
six out of the past seven years, a University of Otago lecturer has won the country’s top teaching accolade at the national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards – the Prime Minister’s Supreme Award.
The most recent recipient – Faumuina Associate Professor Fa’afetai Sopoaga, Associate Dean (Pacific) in the Division of Health Sciences – is credited with a passion and dedication to her craft and for her work improving the health of Pacific people, as well as getting more Pasifika training to become doctors.
While Otago’s first teachers may not have shared Faumuina Associate Professor Sopoaga’s hands-on teaching practices, a focus on excellence and producing students of a high calibre has long been a mandate of Otago’s teaching staff.
Teaching methods originally followed the Scottish traditions of a formal lecture – with the professor doing all the teaching, except in the sciences where assistants were employed for lab classes. While some professors captivated their audiences and members of the public who came to hear the lectures, others missed the mark.
Future high-school principal Muriel May, an Otago student of the 1910s and ‘20s, recalled how one English professor, ‘taught by dictating at a relentless pace to his benches of scribbling students… at the prearranged dates we regurgitated. There were no seminars, no discussions, originality was not fostered nor were personal opinions encouraged.”
It wasn’t until the 1940s that Humanities subjects began introducing tutorials. While this may have been the biggest change to the teaching landscape in the University’s first 50 years, the last 50 has seen a technology evolution that has dramatically altered the way teachers share (and students access) information.
Today, students can login to an online portal that holds everything from study applications to course timetables, resources and discussion forums. Complicated processes such as timetabling classes that previously took weeks of work can now be done automatically. The web has also opened up the opportunity to access a far greater range of information, and collaborate in research, teaching and learning with peers from around the world.