[Teaching] Active Pedagogy

As a newly established educational institution, VinUniversity strives to reach the highest international standards through the cultivation of excellent quality in research, teaching and student experience. In order to realize this vision, we start with our faculty. The “Lunch and Learn” workshop series is one of our initiatives to upskill faculty in active learning.

An idea formed and executed by VinUniversity’s Learning Taskforce, the Lunch and Learn program seeks to help faculty address teaching-and-learning issues that arise during classes and offer practical solutions that they can apply in their course immediately.
Faculty will experience a mix of pedagogically-focused and Canvas-focused sessions to improve their courses’s content and teaching approach, thus effectively facilitating both offline and online teaching and learning. With guidance and support from our taskforce, faculty are able to practice navigating educational technologies such as Zoom and Canvas and learn how to fully utilize available technological resources to facilitate their teaching.

“At any university, building a culture is very important, so right in the first year we want to make it very clear to our faculty and students that we value high-quality teaching a lot. Having faculty share with one another best practices in teaching one of the ways to build this culture. Moreover, faculty learn best when they learn from peers, especially in informal settings. That is why the Lunch and Learn series is initiated – to foster a fun, interactive and voluntary environment wherein our faculty can sit down to catch up with each other and share about how they are promoting teaching in their own classes.” Mrs Amita Verma, Taskforce Leader, shared with us the motivation behind this workshop series.
The series comprises 9 sessions that cover topics related to the most immediate needs and concerns of faculty. Although the last session has concluded on 7th May, the Learning Taskforce hopes to make it a tradition for VinUniversity faculty in the future, so that there will always be an hour every week dedicated to knowledge-sharing and personal bonding in our faculty’s schedule.

Workshop Schedule