Our Team

The transition from high-school education to university-level academia is challenging in itself. Higher education requires students to be well-organised, critical, and proactive. The Cambridge A Global Perspectives course aims to equip TTO students with the competencies and attitudes necessary for university. The students are examined along several lines of assessment; each respective assignment designed to isolate skills in research, communicating, thinking, and reasoning. Bridging the gap between the content and memorisation-driven paradigm of teaching high-school students are typically accustomed to poses a major challenge to the instruction of the GP course - the client noted issues with sustained student engagement and intrinsic motivation. Our role as teaching assistants thus became to bridge the gap between student and teacher, in order to assert accessible authority in the classroom, and assist them in their own transition to higher education. Due to the au courant nature of the course, as well as the dynamic nature of the students to which it is taught, the client saw it to be valuable to invite research interns into the project act as a 'fresh set of eyes' on a project with which he was already very well acquainted.

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The onset of the pandemic and corresponding national regulations necessitated the sudden and widespread introduction of hybrid and online learning. The question of how to create innovative and engaging digital learning material soon arose, as well as the challenge of designing lessons that would be as stimulating virtually as when instructed in-person. Previous research interns who completed the first cycle of this project the year prior laid the foundation for engaging online lessons, structuring course content to better suit a virtual learning environment, and activating students' academic capabilities through a computer screen. Our aim was thus to fortify and build upon the previous group's success, and guide the research in a new direction to generate novel solutions to novel obstacles.