Supporting and Amplifying Teaching Experience of New College Teachers

This thesis investigates how to amplify and support novice college teacher’s teaching experience. It has been found that a majority of percent novice teachers (55%) could not prepare there are lessons effectively (Fantilli & McDougall, 2009), many of them will spend a lot of time adapting to the educating and academic environment. The main issue is that these beginning teachers cannot recognize what kinds of methods are more effective to enhance their teaching efforts in the short period term. At the meanwhile, how to enhance their class quality as a crucial problem as well. There are several factors affecting the overall situation. First, beginning teachers have different cultural backgrounds, characteristics, and experiences, and they are being confronted with new and different situations. Second, due to the courses having been designed by others, they are unfamiliar with the structure of the classes they are teaching. Third, novice college teachers generally lack of any teaching experience, so it is difficult for them to deal with particular situations. Additionally, the process of preparation is quite difficult for them to master. Two main design approaches have been taken in existing research and projects that aim to help novice teachers. One design approach, which is somewhat limited, is to provide interactive functions between teachers and college students during class time. The other kind of design work concentrates on helping teachers to manage their classes. Based on the results of the literature review, peer-product review, and user studies research, I propose a mobile-based campus application with an external technology device to explore and provide useful educational information to novice teacher corresponding to the following four dimensions: teaching experience cognition, augmented reality, communication, and resources collaboration. The application aims to help novice teachers figure out an effective method for improving the quality of their classes. Additionally, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected via online questionnaires, interviews, and frameworks. As a result, I aim to design a system with an external device to support novice college teachers. The app design will concentrate on how to enhance teaching experience for new teachers. The objective is that design solution will help the beginning teachers adapting to the education environment and explore the most appropriate method to enhance the quality of their classes.