Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Pre-course reflection

Hi Everyone
My name is Owais Tariq and I am working as IT/ Business Faculty for HCT Madinat Zayed and Ruwais Colleges. I live in Abu Dhabi and drive daily four hours to reach work. I did my bachelors and masters in Information Technology. Recently I finished my second master’s in business administrator. This is my third year of teaching before that I was working as network engineer.
I have expertise in both in IT and Business area. I am teaching courses like networking, programming, databases, accounting, marketing, management, human resource and other IT and Business courses to bachelor level students.
I have experience with online learning both as a teacher and a student. During my MBA some courses were online where we have to do online reading, discussion and assignments. In our colleges we are using BBVista and Pearson Lab to provide online learning to our students. This is very important tool for our college as most of the staff and students are travelling daily for four to five hours and some time we get chance to see students only once a week. One of the biggest challenge we have is that we have to  use video conference class rooms to deliver our lectures as we are teaching in two different colleges which are 180Km a part and sometime teachers are in one college and students are in other college.
When I heard about the PGCTHE I was really eager to enroll in this course as I think it is a great opportunity to learn about teaching theories and get knowledge from experience of our expert associates. An added advantage for me was that this is an online course and I can attend my classes and do my work from anywhere while travelling. I am looking forward to work with all group members and to learn and enhance education practices.
Owais