MENTORING SMU-X COURSES
The SMU-X curriculum combines academic with experiential learning, challenging students to use their disciplinary knowledge to tackle real world issues through inter-disciplinary approaches. Each course involves partners from corporate, non-profit or government-sector organizations in project design and content delivery, enabling partners and faculty to actively mentor students in the process. As such, the time and effort required of an SMU-X course instructor are significantly more than what are required in a typical regular course.
In order to better support faculty interest to develop and conduct SMU-X courses, "Adjunct Teaching Mentor" (ATM) will be engaged to share the mentoring, facilitation and administrative workload.
Connect with SMU-X if you are interested to be a SMU-X Adjunct Teaching Mentor.
RESPONSIBILITIES OF AN ADJUNCT TEACHING MENTOR
The responsibilities of a SMU-X Adjunct Teaching Mentor includes:
- Be familiar with the overall goals and basics of the SMU-X programs, the instructional lessons presented to the students as well as the course deliverables which are described in the course outlines.
- Be familiar with the SMU-X course guide, including the policies describing the course project reporting, expense guideline and other documentation related to SMU-X courses.
- Serve as a mentor to teams of students. Depending on the project, student teams may be required to develop a strategic business plan or consulting report for a company or organization, or create a required prototype. The role of a mentor is to assist and advise the team as it performs research, analyses data and develops appropriate strategic recommendations. This is not a typical adjunct faculty role as there is less emphasis on in-class presenting and lecturing but greater emphasis on mentoring, guiding and providing feedback.
- Meet with their teams face-to-face for one hour weekly or as required for mentoring sessions. If ATMs are out of town, they should use other means to facilitate such consultation sessions such as Skype, WebEx etc.
- Assist their SMU-X faculty in identifying and recruiting speakers, panelists where needed. Help recruit the appropriate technological and industry experts for their respective teams. ATMs could be asked to do presentations during the course and to share on a subject of their expertise that is relevant to the project.
- Attend the mandatory events (including but not limited to project kickoff, midpoint/rehearsal/final presentations). Attend meetings with the SMU-X faculty (if required, especially in capstone courses with multiple sections) to discuss the course and make operational and academic decisions.
- Read and provide written and verbal feedback on all drafts and final reports, and formal presentations of their teams, and make comprehensive comments.
- Meet with each student individually at the program midpoint to provide oral feedback on the students’ performance to date, including suggestions for improving upon sub-par performance when necessary.
- Coordinate with the SMU-X faculty to contact the client at least three times during the course of the project after the initial project kickoff, a mid-point review, final project presentation. Relevant feedback gathered should be shared with the SMU-X Office/School.
- Notify the SMU-X faculty when anything unusual occurs with their assigned students, teams, companies or international partners/project champions.
- Support the SMU-X faculty to ensure projects maintain standard of academic rigor set out by SMU and the SMU-X faculty