Four faculty members were honored in the School of Engineering (SENG) Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award 2015-16. The award recognizes faculty members who demonstrate continuous excellence in undergraduate teaching, foster students’ interest in the subject, promote students’ learning, develop innovative and effective teaching methodologies, and more.

Prof David Rossiter, Computer Science and Engineering, received the Distinguished Teaching Award. He developed a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) which attracted more than 100,000 students to enroll and is one of the most popular MOOCs offered by HKUST. His teaching excellence has been recognized by being consistently voted the best teacher at various competitions at the university, such as the Best Ten Lecturers in 2014 and UST Great Minds in 2016. He has consistently earned very high student evaluation scores in different courses and has written books on Python Programming and Excel VBA which are being used in the department’s courses.

Prof Ben Chan, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Prof Robin Ma, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Prof Raymond Wong, Computer Science and Engineering, received Teaching Awards.

On top of his very heavy administrative duty as Associate Director of the Center for Engineering Education Innovation to take care of all 700+ Year 1 SENG students, in the past three years Prof Ben Chan taught seven undergraduate courses which were all large classes with an enrollment of over 250 students. This effort has been astounding. He has also been conducting research on teaching and curriculum development, resulting in publications and presentations in international conferences on engineering education. His innovations in developing new teaching pedagogies and learning assessment methods have greatly contributed to the outcome-based course and curriculum development in the department. A dedicated teacher, Prof Chan genuinely has the interest of all students and this has been indicated by his unselfish allocation of time and effort in helping them.

Prof Robin Ma has been active in undergraduate teaching as well as in leading experiential learning activities. He revamped the MECH2907 course by integrating a number of small projects into the classroom, receiving excellent feedback from students as they had the chance to get a lot of hands-on experience. He also led HKUST student teams to participate in engineering design competitions and earned major awards, including achieving the world’s No.2 place in Cybathlon held in Switzerland and Energy Efficient Design Award in the solar car competition organized by the Hong Kong government. Each competition was part of an experiential learning course. He also supervised a team of HKUST students to work with University of Iowa in a virtual design project class which enabled the students to gain international exposure.

Prof Raymond Wong, an innovative instructor, developed a Common Core course on Exploring and Visualizing Data (COMP192/1942) in his early career at HKUST to introduce data analytics techniques to students at beginning undergraduate level. His effort has earned him very high student evaluation scores consistently over the years. He served as Director of the Computer Engineering Program from 2014 to 2016 where he had been successful in promoting student interaction with a large increase in enrollment and raising the quality of the program to a higher level. He has also been introducing new teaching methods, including role play and interactive demonstration, to increase student participation in class.