TNAG-1072-FCO40-1322-Policy-of-the-Government-of-Hong-Kong-on-education-1981 — Page 144

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13.4

Some staff at the Polytechnic also teach overtime in the evenings and are paid for this work. It is therefore difficult to establish with precision either the expected work loads or the actual work loads on a comparative basis.

13.5 The Polytechnic high teaching loads are due in part to the practice of intensive teaching which occurs in the department as in other Hong Kong institutions. The senior staff of the Polytechnic and in the department have the clear intention of reducing student load for the benefit of staff and of the students' educational experience but this may meet some resistance from departmental staff and students as it requires a substantial re-orientation of teaching approach. All the full-time and part-time day release courses of HD level are taught by full-time staff.

14.

THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY IN THE DEPARTMENT AND THE COHESION OF STAFF

14.1 The Department of Civil and Structural Engineering in the

Polytechnic has the advantage of having a sufficient number of academic staff in the department for there to be established a sense of corporate and academic identity is a number of different areas. The numbers are sufficiently large for there to be a number of staff who can support and stimulate each other in the Polytechnic.

14.2 The College staff grievously lack such a sense of

academic community. There are a number of related reasons (see 13 above). The overall number of staff is small. In many areas which are taught in the diploma courses there is only one member of staff with any expertise, in some areas there is no member of staff with the necessary expertise so that the teaching is carried out by the part-time members of staff. The contact between the full-time and the part-time staff is very limited and the full-time members of staff with knowledge of a particular subject does not have any responsibility for and little apparent interest in what the part-time staff teach in his area.

14.3

As well as having inadequate staff in many areas to provide a 'critical mass' to allow an academic community to develop, the staff turn-over is so rapid as to frustrate any attempt at establishing a corporate feeling in the department (see 13.3 above).