(IV) Teaching process management
In line with “the landscape painting project’s” teaching requirements, professional qualified teachers are recruited, and teaching teams made up of teachers familiar with a rapid instruction of landscape painting. Meanwhile, teaching managers are also sent to tutorial centres established in areas where students are concentrated, so as to provide learning support in the form of teaching and management. In the process of project implementation, close attention is paid to find and solve problems in a timely manner, in order to guarantee smooth implementation of the teaching project.
1. Teaching team construction
“The landscape painting project” has attracted 1,268 students nationwide to participate in the learning. The project team established eight tutorial centres in Xi’an, Harbin, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Chengdu, Hohhot, and Beijing. These eight centres are home to a total of 28 classes, each with 40-50 students. The project team employs 35 teachers to offer online student support, with most experienced in tutoring calligraphy and painting. Moreover, they have a profound understanding of how to simplify the content, decrease the number of details, and pursue overall learning achievement. However, 72.73% of these teachers have never participated in online education before. The project team guides them on how to tutor, helps them to familiarise themselves with the online teaching environment, and introduces basic methods of assignment revisions.
To organise individual teachers into a teaching team with a clear division of labour and reciprocal coordination, the project team is made up of a flexible structural design, with teachers in different roles deployed in the proportion of 1:2:7:28.
Figure 5 Organisation Structure of the Teaching Team
The “landscape painting project” teaching team is led by an experienced teacher specialised in landscape painting. There is one chief team inspector and one chief discipline inspector who assist the lead teacher. The chief team inspector coordinates all the members in the team group, checks on work attendance at various positions on a daily basis, and organises and deploys teacher resources. The chief discipline inspector monitors the teaching of each class, assists with teaching, and gives the chief responsible teacher timely feedback regarding any issues. There are a total of 35 online tutors covering 28 classes of about 50 students in each class. Four classes form a group with one leader and vice leader. They are in charge of everyday inspection of their own group, assist teachers in the group in teaching, and take the place of teachers absent from their work. First of all, such an organisational structure puts in place the tutorial task of online teaching and ensures that each student has fixed teachers and classmates. The teaching environment shaped by stable virtual classes helps the students to persist in the learning process. Secondly, the leader and chief inspectors can effectively cope with unexpected conditions and ensure an orderly teaching process.
2. The support and service system that values both teaching and management
To strengthen the organisation and management of course learning, the project team provides each teaching class with a class counselor. The class counselor is always paired with the same students, which facilitates offline exchanges. Similar to the tutors, 52% of the class counselors have had no experience in online educational projects. The project team provides them with guidance to help familiarise them with the online teaching environment, master use of the platform tools for learning records and -up analysis, and to look up students’ assignment submissions.
The construction of the project’s management team follows the teaching team. There are a total of 28 class counselors. They take charge of checking students’ class attendance, hand out learning documents, compile assignment and data statistics, and give feedback to the responsible persons in the tutorial centres. There are eight people in charge of the tutorial centres, and they check the work of the class counselors every day, as well as substitute for class counselors who are not available. Two assistant chief inspectors inspect the learning in each class and report problems to the chief inspector every day. The sole chief inspector is in charge of project management and decision-making. The management team and teaching team cooperate to form a complete support system (See Figure 6).
Figure 6 The support and service system that values both teaching and management
3. Procedure control
The teachers and students of “the landscape painting project” are geographically scattered, so guaranteeing standard procedures is necessary to ensure teaching advances at the same pace. This order is maintained by releasing content via the network. The project group keeps a close eye on teaching progress via Moodle teaching data. Meanwhile, every teaching group is required to submit course reports each week, and focus on the number of people participating in the course and submitting assignments. A regular meeting is held each week to judge the state of teaching, to study the countermeasures to solve the existing problems, and to strengthen targeted supervision of individual students and managers who fall behind the scheduled progress. Frequently occurring problems result in investigations into teaching practices, which may result in changes to best practices. For example, when a particular course segment was too difficult, the project group made a decisive adjustment to the number of assignments. In the above example, a subsequent questionnaire showed the percentage of students who say they couldn’t complete the assignment on time decreased from 11.13% to 5.99%. Thanks to the rigorous process control, the project maintained stable teaching processes.