Influencing the Classroom
What kind of influences can a course bring to the classroom? In recent years, on the campus of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), several musical dramas based on the cultures of the Taiwan  and other foreign countries have been performed. Students of NTUST are in charge of script writing, casting, chorus arrangement and stage design. These performances broadened the cultural horizons of NTUST students and cultivated their outstanding storytelling abilities.
This is just one of the NTUST General Education courses, which is also an outstanding project of the Ministry of Education (MOE) Teaching Practice Research Program. Successful teaching cases for enhancing learning outcomes and efficiency have been increasing on university campuses around Taiwan. Dr. Chun-Ju (Jerome) Huang, who is a Distinguished Professor of General Education from National Chung Cheng University and is also the General Director of the program, explains the Teaching Practice Research Program as follows: “The MOE expects that the Teaching Practice Research Program will motivate instructors to start from the point of view of problem solving in the classrooms and reflect these solutions on introspection, critical thinking and pedagogy. Instructors are encouraged to return their feedback to the classroom.” 
The exact meaning of the program may still be vague by reading these previous paragraphs. Generally speaking, there are three keywords to highlight the program: teaching, implementation, and research. The goal is to encourage instructors from higher education to teach students as if they were carrying out research. Research experiments must be continually improved; thus, the teaching efficacy will be continually improved by considering classroom problems and making suitable changes in pedagogy.
By achieving the goals of the program, instructors from higher education thereby become not just teaching practitioners, but also pedagogical researchers. Dr. Huang believes that executing a teaching practice research project requires two key concepts: first, bringing relevant influences to the classroom and second, every influence must be evaluated based on real tests. In other words, in this program, the design of the course must follow at least two considerations: first, has the thinking behind the design of every aspect of teaching been clearly explained, and second, can every step of instruction match the teaching objectives that are initially set out?
Looking at the Teaching Practice Research Program Achievements and Exchange Platform, every case highlights its problem awareness, teaching research design, teaching research experience, teaching practice achievements, teaching reflections, and considerations for future research. Whether the instructors participate in the program or not, the process of organizing the classes helps them to inspect their teaching contents and check if the classes are really beneficial for students’ learning. 

Enhancing Program Efficacy with Concrete Encouragement
People may be curious about how the Teaching Practice Research Program differs from the Instructional Excellence Project which is aimed at improving instruction quality. Why does the MOE still want to promote this program?
As everyone knows, universities embody two important values: expanding knowledge and cultivating talents. To expand the scope of human knowledge, many higher education instructors devote their lives to academic research and are promoted to the position of professor due to their efforts. However, if instructors spend most of their time to cultivate talents in universities, their professional values will not be revealed.  
It is undeniable that the idea of “emphasizing research rather than teaching” permeates every section of the college campus. To change this mindset, for more than a decade the MOE has been promoting various projects to hopefully exert some influence.
Most importantly, whether the project will be effective depends on what the instructors notice regarding the considerable benefits from improving teaching quality. To resolve this situation, the MOE started to promote the Teaching Practice Research Program in 2017.
Unlike other previous projects, the Teaching Practice Research Program does not just provide an amount of subsidy to each institution for institutional project managers to distribute. The program resembles the research projects of the Ministry of Science and Technology, for instructors from higher education to apply through the MOE, and once it is approved, the MOE will directly transfer the subsidy to the instructors, allowing them to improve the quality of their courses.
In addition, if instructors execute a teaching practice research project, they not only have to submit a conceptual application beforehand; after the project ends, they also have to produce a research paper which is important enough to be published. The research needs to cover the teaching efficiency of the course, a precise methodology, and an accurate tool to measure whether the teaching efficiency meets the teaching objectives which were set out when the course was first offered.
Dr. Chih-Yao Hou, an associate professor from the Seafood Science at National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, offered a course on production development design that brought students out of the classroom to a grouper fish factory for an observational field trip. During the time in the factory, the students had opportunities to converse with the industry workers. Additionally, students then designed products for the industrial market. Throughout the course, Dr. Hou used the online classroom management software Zuvio to assess students’ learning efficiency.
The research papers produced by instructors must have a place of publication to enhance their academic outcome. For this purpose, the MOE publishes the Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and encourages instructors to submit their papers. This journal can be credited for promotions, thereby motivating their participation in the Teaching Practice Research Program.
According to the program office, 50 instructors (see table) have used a teaching practice research project for various promotions since 2019. In addition, the journal has been used by two instructors for teaching promotions, one instructor for research promotions, and 48 instructors for research credit.

Celebrating Instructors Who Emphasize Teaching
From the statistics, we can see that the Teaching Practice Research Program has given tertiary institutions and instructors a platform to highlight their values. Instructors who are passionate about teaching can use their thorough lesson plans and methodology to reach the mission of higher education—cultivating talents.
Generally speaking, the Teaching Practice Research Program is divided into twelve subjects for instructors to consider applying for. These include: General Education, Education, Arts Humanities and Design, Business and Management, Civics (including Law and Politics), Engineering, Mathematics and Physics, Medicine and Nursing, Biotechnology and Agriculture, Human Ecology, University Social Responsibility (USR) Projects, and Special Projects of Technical Practice.
Among these subjects, universities of science and technology that focus on practical training have a higher rate of project approval in the academic areas of Human Ecology, Medicine and Nursing, and Technical Practice. Many of these new courses turn out to be innovative and interesting teaching projects due to the creative designs from instructors.
Dr. Chi-Yin Hong, an associate professor of Food and Beverage Management and Culinary Arts at Kun Shan University, combined her research of local culinary culture with her English course to cultivate more hospitality talent with outstanding bilingual communication competence. In her English class, she divides her students into groups to research the culinary culture of different regions, and then requires them to use professional English to create a written guide and deliver an oral presentation. She expects to improve their professional English through practical useful course contents.
The Teaching Practice Research Program gained support from a lot of instructors soon after its implementation. Since the problems are drawn directly from the classroom, learning efficiency has obviously been upgraded. Within these past five years, there were approximately 15,300 applications, and the number continues to increase each year. In 2022, around 3,700 applications were approved, and the annual approval rate is around 42%–45%. Every instructor can receive a maximum subsidy of NT$ 500,000.
The Teaching Practice Research Program has changed classrooms entirely. Learning efficiency is no longer just reflected by student evaluations. As students truly improve in their academic areas, instructors who are passionate about teaching also gain a stage on which they can showcase their value.

Feature Report