Dr Pal Fekete | Academic Director at Taylors College Sydney
In this video (part 1 of 2), Pal Fekete discusses his role guiding innovative curriculum as Academic Director at Taylors College in Sydney; a preparation college for international students poised to attend the University of Sydney.
With a passion for innovation in pedagogy and as an early adopter of technology, Pal outlines his history as a maverick in the use of fledgling online technology in the late 1980s-90s, deploying this in the education sector, and his engagement with early version learning management systems.
Pal explores the power of technology-based tools and video platforms to enhance the learning experience, and details his process for delivering impactful content online. He explains how he applies these principles to the hard sciences including his subject matter forte, physics, and his approach for scaling to other subjects across the broader curriculum toward stakeholder buy-in.
Delving into authentic assessment design to uphold academic integrity, Pal explains his institution’s use of invigilation software and its efficacy as a supplementary measure for assessment security, rather than the crux of the strategy. He also covers their reliance on tools such as Turnitin to instil formative learning above punitive measures, to safeguard integrity.
Finally, Pal evaluates the opportunities heralded by the pandemic-induced online learning experiment, including facilitation of the ‘flipped learning’ modality through online resources, and gamification and its less straightforward application to subjects such as the hard sciences.