Teaching Innovation Award, 2020 Teaching Excellence Awards - Team award

(From left to right) Dr Veronica SF Lam, Dr John TC Fung (Leader), Dr Janet YH Wong and Ms Michelle TH Pang of School of Nursing
for Evaluation on Students’ Clinical Competence after a Virtual Simulation Education Programme during the COVID-19 Pandemic

How would you describe your teaching style?
Dr John Fung: Our core values in teaching are intrinsically aligned with the institutional educational aims: critical intellectual inquiry, ability to tackle novel situations, lifelong learning, critical self-reflection, communication and collaboration, global citizenship and advocacy for the improvement of human conditions. Our strongest belief is that great teachers must inspire students to learn proactively such that they can solve real-life problems independently.

How do you integrate your research and teaching?
Dr Janet Wong: Nursing education emphasizes empowering students with knowledge, skills and competencies to cope with the ever-changing healthcare environment. To engage students to learn complex skills, teaching innovations are always helpful. However, empirical research on evaluating the newly developed teaching innovations cannot be overlooked because it provides information for improvement, in particular, about our implementation process and learning outcomes achievement. In addition, our evaluation can assess the inclusiveness of our students with background diversity. This is useful for the nursing programme as we always need to handle big classes with more than 200 students.

Ms Michelle Pang: Although the COVID-19 pandemic is a threat, it is an opportunity for the development of new pedagogy in nursing education. Virtual simulation offers an opportunity to enhance learning in place of some direct practice when that is not available. It helps students to explore how theory and practice can be integrated into actual situations they are likely to experience in the clinical setting. The inclusion of virtual simulation learning in nursing is a growing area of interest. This experiential learning can be used not only in nursing but also in other professional training programme such as physician and social worker training.

What have been your greatest challenges in teaching?
Dr Veronica Lam: Teaching a large class face to face is challenging, and teaching a large class online is even more difficult as students may easily be distracted by other things at home and we cannot see the facial expression of those students who do not turn on the camera.