A Two-Stage Teaching Philosophy for Postgraduate Students

Paper in proceeding, 2023

In this study, we develop a two-stage structured teaching philosophy that is able to cater to the needs of postgraduate students with different expectations about the learning outcomes. At the postgraduate level, different students have distinct expectations about their future careers. Some may want to pursue their career as an engineer, with little interest in research and development. Others may have different views and would like to pursue their career as a researcher or an academic in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to take into account the distinctions among students’ expectations about courses. The proposed teaching philosophy divides the course sessions into two stages. In the first stage, fundamental and common knowledge bases for the courses are delivered to all students, which ensures the students receive the necessary and basic knowledge that is required for both industrial and academic pathways. Afterward, the second stage leverages the flipped classroom model to let the students choose their learning and course materials with different emphases as per their own expectations and interests. Customized learning and teaching materials are prepared for students who prefer the industrial pathway and students who show more predilections for the industrial pathway. We will use a master course about transportation engineering to empirically test this teaching philosophy and evaluate its performance, including a comparison with the conventional teaching process. The results demonstrate that the new structure is well received by students and is much beneficial for improving students’ subjective evaluations of the courses and performances in learning.