Busy weeks ahead!

Apart from the ongoing Introduction to Information Systems course to 280+ undergraduates that will run until early May, I’m (i) giving two talks (in April and May) to applicants for our business undergraduate program, (ii) starting my eight-week MBA course on Digital Marketing Strategy and Analytics in about two weeks’ time, and (iii) teaching an executive workshop on Platform Strategy sometime in June.

And that’s just for the teaching gig…

 

And the winner is….

I’m delighted that Prof. Percy Dias from my department is one of the winners for this year’s teaching award. Many students whom I know rated him very highly, and he is consistently one of the best instructors in our school. If I’m not mistaken, this is his third or fourth time winning the Franklin Prize. Heartiest congrats to him!

And because there are more deserving winners, it means I didn’t win this year 🙂

Nominated for Teaching Excellence Award!

Just as I’m wrapping up my teaching for this semester, I received a note that says I’ve been nominated for The Franklin Prize for Teaching Excellence by the business school. This is an annual prize to recognize business faculty contributions to teaching excellence in undergraduate and graduate courses. The Franklin Prize has 6 awards: three for undergraduate, and three for MBA/MSc teaching. I have been nominated as a candidate for the Undergraduate Teaching category.

This nomination is based on my teaching performance in Spring 2014, but I’m sure evaluations for my Spring 2013 course help too. (Student evaluations for Spring 2015 course has yet been officially released… perhaps I will have another shot next year). I’m glad students generally enjoyed the course, and I’m grateful for their positive evaluations. Receiving this nomination shows that I’ve been doing something right in my teaching — now I just need to figure what these right things are.

My teaching changes lives…

A student who attended my very first “Introduction to Information Systems” course in HKUST (Spring 2013) just sent me an email:

I am happy to share with you a piece of good news – I got a graduate offer from PwC Consulting. Actually I want to thank you for your support and teaching where you created a platform to us to learn proactively and freely. It was also the business-related technology information you taught that led to my interest in “IT in business” and then I kept learning more about this. Since IT actually has over-whelming power in business now, I got well prepared for the interview, where I shared the related ideas in the business case study. It’s definitely a pleasure to be your student and learn IT from a business perspective. Thanks again!

Simply wonderful! Such news make all the efforts that I put in preparing and delivering the course worthwhile.

P.S. Sorry for the dramatic post title 🙂