Teaching at SUTD

This term (just finished last week) was my first time teaching undergraduate students. I taught the first year maths course, covering calculus and numerical modelling. Overall it was a good experience and not as hard as I was expecting, thanks in part to all of the course materials being ready-made by some of the other instructors.

SUTD has quite a special system for its undergraduate coursework. For the first term all students take the same introductory courses, including maths. Rather than teaching this as a single big lecture class, the students are split into 11 cohorts of about 45 students each, with two faculty members assigned to teach each cohort, plus additional teaching assistants. 

During a class, one faculty member would focus on delivering the content while the other would go around the room to answer any questions one-on-one. To further promote discussion and interactions amongst the students and teachers, the "lectures" are regularly broken up by example problems for the students to work through in groups. This means the classes are also longer than usual - 2.5 hours each, twice a week.

One thing we tried differently this year was to make the weekly problem sets optional. Students were encouraged to work through the assignments themselves, but they were not graded. The motivation for this was that with the advent of tools like ChatGPT it is very easy for students to copy and paste the questions and immediately get full worked solutions, so we didn't think this would be a reliable way to grade the students' progress.

The flip side to this, of course, is that if the assignments are not graded it is extremely difficult to motivate the students to complete them. Indeed, the only time I had students come for office hours was just before their mid-term exam when they were trying to cram all the content from the first half of the course. Many students were unprepared for the mid-term, but grades improved somewhat in the final.

From the point of view of a fresh lecturer, I found being paired up with more experienced lecturers very helpful. Each week I would teach one class per cohort, and spend the other class answering any student questions. This allows one to see what methods work better and what concepts students are struggling with in real time, helping to improve one's own style of teaching. 

Looking forward to teaching this course again and hopefully doing a bit better next year!