We're excited to announce the release of the Teaching Fellow Handbook for all GEC Teaching Fellows! We hope this resource will help all our TFs quickly get oriented and well-prepared for GEC programs. The handbook offers a clear overview of our program structure, outlines the responsibilities and tasks of TFs, and serves as both a guide and a checklist throughout their journey with us.

In line with our long-standing people-oriented approach, we have developed this edition of the TF Handbook to help our Teaching Fellows better understand their roles and support students more effectively.

GEC Academy experienced rapid growth in the past few years. Faculty referral played a key role in our strong growth, and we thank all our professors for your great support. In the rest of 2021 and the upcoming 2022, we are keen to maintain and expand the effective connections with our faculties. We welcome our collaborating faculties to recommend your experienced colleagues, researchers, and education enthusiasts to participate in this great endeavor.

The quickest way to refer a candidate will be going to your designated academic manager. Simply let her/him know that your friend might be potentially interested in cooperating with GEC as well. The academic manager will connect your friend with our Faculty Outreach Managers to proceed. Once the faculty outreach managers are connected with the newly-referred, they will walk the new faculty step by step along the process to establish a partnership--just like how you joined GEC at the beginning! In order to honor your time and effort spent on helping GEC expanding our faculty network, a referral honorarium will be provided as a token of our appreciation.

Due to the dynamic nature of the market, as well as the fact that GEC considers our students' demands, we cannot guarantee the new faculty when his/her program will be launched during the first connection. However, we are always open to discussing more possibilities. It is noteworthy that we are flexible with the commitment that each faculty is able to deliver. Whether it is a Path Academic Online Research Seminar practice, a 1-on-1 individualized research mentorship, cooperation on Independent Project Qualification (IPQ), or other new initiatives, we are happy to offer as many options as possible to our new faculties.

When we receive the topic and time, our marketing department will start to advertise and they will focus on the highlights of the course that they thought would be attractive for the students. However, sometimes there will be some deviations between the marketing department and our faculties’ original intention, resulting in some students’ confusion about the course. Therefore, from next month, our academic managers will also participate in the work of product advertisement. We also hope that you can also provide your ideas on the course, such as the most attractive and important content of your course.

We normally leave four months for enrollment so that we have plenty of time to recruit enough students to start the program. Although we fully understand that plans often change, it is difficult for us to make big adjustments given that students may also have other academic or extracurricular activities arranged when they don’t take courses at GEC during the summer vacation. Instead, we can make adjustments case by case, such as skipping a week in the middle of the program, asking the mentor to hold a mentor session on a given date, then delaying the lecture for a week, etc. We totally understand that emergencies happen and we want to support you in every way we can, so please feel free to contact your academic manager when you have such concern, and we are very happy to offer our help.

GEC has a nationwide recruitment network. We also collaborate with educational institutions that allow us to access many academically strong and passionate students. In the student recruitment stage, we organize various online and onsite events and marketing campaigns to promote our programs such as inviting students to trial classes/demo sessions. While GEC’s network enables us to encounter many excellent students, more importantly, we want to keep the opportunity open to those passionate about improving themselves.

Some faculties might have concerns regarding the student’s academic competence in this way. In order to address this concern, GEC proactively collects the prerequisites from our faculty and uses that information to examine students. We might also give some quizzes to students (typically for those courses that have strict prerequisites) - normally 10 questions. The lead instructor could let us know the minimal score/percentage that the student needs to achieve before signing up. Interviewing students is the last step in ensuring it is an appropriate match and balanced expectations. However, we prefer not to have too strict prerequisites, as we hope that our faculty’s program could cater to a broader audience in order to ensure a successful commencement.

It’s undeniable that the possibility of receiving a recommendation letter from our professors attracts some students to participate in the program. However, a lot of students are indeed here for the project-based learning experience. In fact, for many students, the program is their very first project-based learning experience with a professor like you. In their schools, they might be going to lectures with 70 students, and many of them haven’t got the chance to work on their own projects, or write a properly developed academic paper. The knowledge and introduction to research skills offered in the program could be valuable to them and could be a good start for their future studies.

With the GEC team growing and expanding at a rather fast pace and with more new cooperation opportunities increasing over the past years, it may cause some of our teachers, especially new faculties, some confusion with respect to responsibilities of different teams within GEC, for example, who to talk to for certain matters.

Click HERE to access to List of Staff