Abstract:

There is shortage in academics with increased numbers of students across different speciality and worldwide. This may lead to employment of academic staff who may not have had previous experience in teaching or have formal education in teaching and in curriculum development. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to shed some light on best practices related teaching and learning, emphasising on the importance of quality assurance and accountability, and basing curriculum practices on the code of practice when designing and delivering a course. This includes: quality of teaching, quality of content and process of delivery. Of equal importance to a well developed program, is educators’ teaching style and strategies, and attitudes towards learners and teaching. Effective educators are those who are open-minded, enthusiastic, confident in their teaching, knowledge and skills, being non-judgemental, flexible, showing interest in students’ learning and growth and who have a sense of humour. This presentation highlights the importance of these qualities in creating an interesting environment that is conductive to learning. Furthermore, the importance of variation in educators’ styles to cater for the diversity among students, their learning needs, preferred learning styles, prior learning and experiences, age and cultural backgrounds will also be discussed.. The role of teacher as facilitator of learning in adult education (Andragogy- teaching adults), which differs from the teacher’s role (Pedagogy-teaching children) will be addressed with other adult learning principles. Effective teaching goes hand in hand with well developed assessment tasks that reflect deep, meaningful learning, and at the same time covering the three domains of learning: knowledge, skills and attitudes. Hence, principles underpinning good assessment practice such as fairness, reliability, validity, efficacy, sufficiency and authenticity of evidence, and the importance of feedback will also be discussed. Since there is no single assessment method that can adequately assess all the three domains of learning, different assessment strategies need to be used. This paper will examine the advantages and disadvantages of various assessment methods and implementation issues. Further recommendations for best practice and quality assurance such as the use of teacher's self-evaluation and students' evaluation of teaching and unit will conclude the paper.

Keywords:

Best practice, quality assurance, teaching and learning strategies.