Teaching Philosophy
For me, teaching is one of the key attractions to an academic career. Teaching is more than just the transmission of information or facts; we must help the students understand, and this includes matters beyond the nominal content of a particular course. With this in mind, my goal in teaching students is threefold: to introduce students to fundamental concepts of the subject matter, to show them how to use those concepts, and to encourage them to learn on their own.
This is especially crucial when educating engineers, who will be called upon to solve problems and teach themselves new technologies and techniques throughout their careers. Thus, I see my role as a teacher primarily as one in which I show students how to use the knowledge they have at hand to analyze and solve problems. Often, these problems can be rigidly defined and mathematical, but just as often they can be open-ended, and in such cases it is necessary to guide students through the problem-solving, show them how to find the answer on their own, and provide feedback when they go astray. This approach forms the foundation of my teaching.
Teaching Strategies and Practice
The key to helping students retain information and understand how to use it is to get them actively involved in learning. Engineering education traditionally offers a number of excellent venues for this type of active learning—such as labs, assignments, projects, and work terms—but such techniques are typically applied outside of the classroom, and students cannot have labs and projects for every course without being completely overwhelmed. Consequently, I try to bring active learning into my lectures through various in-class exercises. These can range from soliciting the next step in solving a problem from the class, to partner exercises where students work with a neighbour to find an answer, to student presentations in class. Incorporating these different activities can appeal to different student learning styles and provide valuable formative assessment to students as they engage with the course material more frequently than just the night before an exam or assignment due date. This can improve student learning even in courses that incorporate projects and labs, since it helps students get more out of the classroom lecture time.
Teaching Goals and Aspirations
I have strong interest in teaching courses such as digital logic and systems design, computer organization and embedded systems, and compilers, all of which are common to undergraduate computer engineering curricula. Furthermore, I am keenly interested in developing courses on FPGA architecture, hardware synthesis, and reconfigurable and high-performance computing, whether as senior undergraduate or graduate offerings. I also desire to continue my professional development in teaching, including exploring the use of new approaches (such as e-books, online video and animation, and custom software) to facilitate student learning. I doubt I will ever be fully satisfied with my performance as a teacher, and as such, I will continually strive to develop new techniques to engage myself and my students with my teaching.
Teaching Dossier
A version of my full teaching dossier can be accessed in PDF format here.
Sample Course Materials
I have mirrored the content of websites developed 5--6 years ago for courses I was teaching or TAing at the time. Today, this content would likely be hosted on a course or content management system, rather than a custom website.
