Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Award – TEACHER EXCELLENCE
Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment – Department of Electrical Engineering Technology
Many 21st-century teachers at UJ develop pedagogical courage, resilience, scholarly teaching practises and excellent technological skills. Very few, however, manage to exemplify and combine these attributes with the insight, passion and creativity of Dr Philip Baron, who teaches in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Over the past decade, Dr Baron has developed a unique and dynamic blend of scholarship, theory, and application, characterising all his work. Extensive research into the potential value of educational videos has resulted in a sophisticated analytical model based on YouTube social media analytics, which can be used to evaluate the quality of teaching tools and frameworks. The model is extremely complex, involving over sixty metrics measuring a range of variables, including user behaviour and activity, and tracking individual videos’ performance and quality. The result is a fascinating and compelling argument for the use of high-quality YouTube videos to measure the quality of teaching, which is as rigorous as those used to measure research output.
As a perfect illustration of this model’s application and potential value, Dr Baron uses his own social media channel to show how he and his numerous videos, which demonstrate applications in Electronic Engineering, have been received. His online profile reveals that he has received over thirty million views and now has twenty-five thousand daily viewers. His most recent award, received this year, is the YouTube Silver Play Button, which marks over 100,000 online subscribers. Over and above this, he receives numerous email messages from appreciative colleagues, has won several awards for conference contributions, has published his work widely and has launched an academic journal, “Enacting Cybernetics.”
We are here this evening to celebrate an extraordinary body of work – Dr Baron offers individual teachers and UJ as an institution the opportunity to place the rigorous evaluation of teaching and learning firmly alongside research. Congratulations Dr Baron – we have no doubt that you will achieve even greater success in the years to come.
