Notes for Educators: AMA Teaching Methods

The AMA teaching methods are Activate, Motivate, and Assess.

Activate

Interact with the group and solicit each student’s contribution. Engage your students in collaborative learning (let them work in teams) and collaborative teaching – give the stage to your students so they can review the material and share their best practices. One learns twice while teaching! Reward the best contributors.

Motivate

Use all possible means to connect the course materials to the students’ areas of expertise, thus increasing their motivation level. Motivation is the key to opening students’ eyes and ears and unlocking their memories.

Assess

Facilitate a question-and-answer session, let students work in groups, and help them keep precise focus and timing.

Use the on-line assessment and evaluation forms periodically from the very beginning of the course.

This book provides a special section at the end of each chapter to reinforce the AMA methods.

The Integrating Questions are designed to help students build a thorough understanding of the relevance, relationships, and application of the content in the real world. To ensure that students can relate course theories to the workplace, illustrate points with examples drawn from your professional experience and the experiences of the students.

The Case Study serves as a guide for student assignments. The instructor can modify and personalize assignments based on instructor-student interactions and early assessments of a student’s current and desired skills.

Recap Presentations and Midterm Assessments

It is recommended that you conduct two or three student recap presentations (ten to fifteen minutes each) starting with the second class. The content of each presentation is the student’s work on the Case Study–based assignments. The presentations may serve as midterm assessments. They also increase students’ motivation level and their understanding of the material (you learn twice while teaching).

Delivery Format for Assignments and Presentations

It is recommended to format assignments and presentations as illustrated white papers using, for example, Web pages, MS Word, PDF, or PowerPoint with notes. The content considers three levels of the topic: definition (high level), functionality and applicability (middle level), and examples of implementations (low level). These three levels roughly map the “why,” “what,” and “how” of the selected subject. Students will enhance their ability to clearly express their ideas and will learn the art of publishing and presentation with text, images, diagrams, and code extracts.

Final Team Projects

Students may integrate selected parts of their weekly work assignments into team projects. This approach helps the student increase the quality of his or her work and consistently focus on the course materials.

Integration is not a copy-and-paste process. The team project allows students to exercise the tool that comes with this book and helps them share their work with a distributed knowledge repository. The high visibility of a student’s achievement adds to the perfection of her or his work and makes it possible to directly tie student’s efforts to industry needs.