The Inaugural Ministry of Education's Annual Excellence Award for General Education Teachers announced its roster of winners recently. Two of the five winners were NTU faculty. These two winners were Dean Grace Chu-Fang Lo from the College of Life Science and Dr. Kuo-Yen Wei from the Department of Geoscience, respectively. These two NTU faculty members received public commendations at the National Conference of University Presidents held on January 11^th.

With the changing times, the achievements of professional education alone have been unable to meet the developmental demands of a multi-faceted society. Whether a university can rank among the top universities in the world hinges greatly upon whether a university can develop a robust "General Education" system. In order to extol models of general education, and to encourage good teachers to participate in general education, thereby enhancing the performance and quality of general education, the Ministry of Education decided to establish the Annual Excellence Award for General Education Teachers.

Dean Grace Chu-Fang Lo's general education courses are all centered around life sciences, and branch into other directly or indirectly related disciplines as a basis for expanding students' vision and breadth of mind. In her course "Life Science and Human Living", Dean Lo made a connection between the professional knowledge of life science and the current hot topics such as embryonic stem cells, avian influenza, genetic engineering, genetically modified food, and rare genetic diseases, thus linking life science courses to social and human studies.

During his twenty plus years of teaching, Professor Kuo-Yen Wei, another award winner, imparts to his students a "systematic approach, and comprehensive care" method for understating the planet Earth. His general education course titled "The Evolution and Extinction of Species," uses a diversified approach of teaching. In addition to using multimedia and self-prepared materials, he arranges debates, field collection trips, etc, to inspire students' learning interest. Furthermore, through the discussion of controversial or difficult topics in geology, chemistry, and astronomy, Dr. Wei induces students to contemplate on the nature of planet Earth from different perspectives.

Both Dean Lo and Professor Wei are senior and excellent faculty members at NTU. Besides their outstanding achievements in academic research, over the years they have spared no efforts in teaching the best general education courses. Winning the Ministry of Education's Excellence Award validates their years of hard work and proves NTU faculty's contribution to general education in more ways than one!