I took a teaching course last academic session from May to June 2018 which was organised by the university primarily for Graduate Teaching Assistants, and Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) if they were interested. As a GRA I am not required in my contract to teach so it was an optional module but I thought it was best to sign up for the class as I could possibly in the future like to do some teaching. For the module assessment, we needed to have two teaching observations. The module leader organised it in an easier way by making one a micro-teaching where our learners are coursemates, and the second a real teaching session which could take the form of a seminar, tutorial, guest teaching or a proper classroom lecture. Since I did not have any teaching modules, I and my colleague liaised with my supervisor to organise a seminar that would pull together research students of 3 professors in the department. The seminar held on the 23rd October 2018. After I and my colleague taught for half an hour each, a pitching session followed where other PhD students in attendance briefly spoke about their research for about 5 minutes.
My teaching session - deep clustering
My session was about deep clustering, a technique I am investigating in my research on anomaly detection for video networks. Here’s the video of the session. I apologise that the slides are not very visible in the video. I have included them below or you can download at bit.ly/deepclustering.
Aftermath
The attendees of the meeting unanimously consented to have this meeting on a regular basis as a way to keep abreast with the research of peers, share challenges, brainstorm on research work and to open opportunities for future collaborations. In the future, I would share anything interesting that springs up from this.
I am expecting to receiving feedback from the observers of my teaching session. With this I can prepare a reflective presentation which will form part of my course assessment.