Prestigious Australian teaching awards for Sunway campus staff

6 August 2008

Two teaching staff at Monash University's Sunway campus have been awarded Australia’s highly prestigious teaching awards - the '2008 Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning'.

The Citation is presented by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, which was previously the Carrick Institute.

Dr Catherine Yule from the School of Science and Dr Rajendran Parthiban from the School of Engineering received their awards on 6 August at a ceremony in Melbourne, Australia.
Dr Yule's Citation was for "contextualising quality science curricula to engage students in local environmental issues in Southeast Asia through field activities in forest and aquatic ecosystems".

She said the award reflected the importance placed on environmental education – particularly through field experience.

“In the past, the educational value of field activities has rarely been acknowledged or fully understood, so it has been a challenge to change this attitude.

“Undertaking field work is actually one of the best ways for students to learn biology. Individual lectures will be forgotten, but memories of field trips will last for a life time. We can see the results of our teaching in what the students are doing now through their careers to make a difference to the environment.

“It also shows that environmental conservation is a strong career option and businesses are quickly accepting it as an important area of work,” she said.
For the Sunway campus, she said the awards reflected the quality achieved by the teaching staff and affirms Monash’s success in maintaining high standards at its Malaysian campus.

“We’ve in no way been second to the Australian campuses and these awards show the quality of teaching offered at the Sunway campus,” said Dr Yule, who also received the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence this year.
Dr Rajendran received his citation for "achieving outstanding improvements in student satisfaction and outcomes with team-driven problem-based learning and integrated feedback in a difficult electrical engineering subject".

He said the difficulty faced by students in learning the subject prompted him to research and adopt a new teaching approach that has significantly improved the teaching outcome for the subject – electromagnetics.

“Basically, this new approach looks at how students learn and adopts strategies that improve the learning outcomes. The strategies effectively convey the concepts to students by actively engaging them through participation in the teaching process.” The approach developed by Dr Rajendran has dramatically improved the pass rate for the subject.

Dr Rajendran said he was spurred to make his submission for the citation by the success of School of Engineering colleague Dr Teoh Kok-Soo, who received the award in 2005.“I would like to thank the campus and the School of Engineering, as well as my colleagues and students for their support throughout,” he said.

Pro Vice-Chancellor and President (Malaysia) Professor Robin Pollard, in congratulating the citation recipients, said having two teaching staff receive the Citation in a year was a wonderful achievement and demonstrated the excellence in teaching at the Sunway campus.

"The awards are highly prestigious and reflect extremely well on the staff, their Schools, Faculties and Campus.  I understand that in total Monash staff will receive seven such awards, and for our campus staff to achieve 2 of the 7 is a wonderful outcome," he said. – Jasbir Singh.

For more information

Dr Catherine Yule

Dr Rajendran Parthiban

Australian Learning and Teaching Council