Seminars for Academic Personnel of Faculty of Social and Political Sciences

The Center for Social Science has also been the platform for expensive and regular faculty development sessions. These have focused on various questions, partially guided by the needs of the local faculty.

Integrating academic writing into syllabi has been one of the key topics throughout 2004-2007. This has been the subject of regular weekly workshops, in which participants developed first-rate papers which subsequently can also be used as sample papers for their own students.

The development of integrated syllabi, emphasizing the contractual and strategic component, as well as the integration of core skills into the curriculum, has been another constant theme, and regular workshops, including a weekend workshop in June 2005.

Other topics for faculty development have been methods of online delivery.

With these workshops, the center developed basic ideas that can form the nucleus of a broader Faculty Development Program at TSU, especially because this has helped to assess local needs and find adequate methods of responding to them.

CSS introduced and implemented new teaching methodology and made new teaching methods mandatory both for professors as well as students. Apart from traditional lecture series, seminars and colloquiums became a necessary part of the teaching process. Syllabi became a necessary part of the teaching process as a teaching strategy and a contract between the teachers and students, along with the written feedback on students’ performance, innovative approaches to students’ examination techniques such as presentations, group projects, and independent research assignments. Assessment as the cumulative character of the assessment (not only final exams but also students’ attendance, participation and contribution was continuously assessed during the whole year).