The faculty of BMS is buzzing with new ideas and exciting projects worth to give the spotlight. Therefore, in the May newsletter of the BMS Teaching Academy:
- New WSV Innovation Projects started!
- Groeifonds (growth fund) and its impact on higher education
- Dutch higher education award for the master insert “shaping responsible futures”
- Activity calendar
- Get to know: Lara Carminati and Arnold Enklaar, and how their micro-module brings students from four countries together
New WSV Innovation Projects started!
The BMS faculty is buzzing with new ideas and innovations waiting for implementation. Therefore, we are happy to announce that four WSV Innovation Projects will start:
- Minor Well-Being for all students of the UT. Using best practices from positive clinical psychology and technology, and other lessons from the psychology curriculum, a minor will be set up to bring the topic of wellbeing to a wider audience of students. The minor will be set up along three lines: a theoretical module, an experiential module and a practical module.
- YLab is your Lab, centred around working with sensors, with the aim to create a self-contained line of education for BMS programs, covering the complete research workflow, from making and programming sensors, analysing sensor data, to interpreting physiological signals in valid and useful ways.
- EasyGrader. To improve the objectivity, reliability, and efficiency of the assessment of open exam questions, IEBIS and the BMSLAB together developed the tool EasyGrader as part of a Comenius research project. EasyGrader is a grading assistance tool that is directly connected to Remindo and can cluster answers to open questions, based on their similarity and a list of keywords. This project aims to build on that, building a corpus of questions to train the model and integrate this model into an enhanced version of EasyGrader, in evaluation with teachers.
- Towards an Interactive Sustainability Minor; with a spin-off to the M-EEM. This project aims to apply innovations on interactivity and active learning in the areas of video-production and Challenge Based Learning to enhance the 30 EC preparatory minor of the M-EEM titled Towards Managing Sustainability in a Technological Context in order to improve the education in the minor and make it more attractive for prospective students.
The project STEERS (Smart Research Recommender System) is extended for another year!
Keep an eye on our WSV Innovation Project page for more information on these projects.
Groeifonds (growth fund) and its impact on higher education
The government is making a total of €5 billion available from the National Growth Fund ('Nationaal Groeifonds') for 28 innovative projects. The University of Twente will receive a large share of that funding, for the projects NXTGEN, PhotonDelta and Einstein Telescope (read more).
Especially interesting for us as BMS Teaching Academy is how this growth fund will impact education, for instance through the Digitalisation Impulse Education. Here, transformation hubs are planned to be set up where researchers, teachers, learners, and industry meet to experiment and improve on a certain topic. To start with, two transformation hubs will be formed soon: “flexible and efficient, organised education” and “digital learning materials”. We strive to represent the UT in these nation-wide hubs, in a later newsletter we hope to present ways for you to get involved as well.
Dutch Higher Education Award for the master insert “Shaping Responsible Futures”
Last week, the Dutch Higher Education award was given to the Master Insert “Shaping Responsible Futures”, winning €1.2 million and allowing for further development of the programme! The master insert is an extracurricular 30 EC programme which master students can insert into their regular master programme, focussing on transdisciplinary problem solving.
We are proud of the team and happy to see an educational innovation get the spotlight it deserves! The team received the price from Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf (Education, Culture and Science) during the Comenius Festival. (link to full news bulletin)
Activity calendar
Join one of the activities and combine meeting your colleagues with exchange experiences. Attending these activities can also be a great inspiration for teacher professionalisation activities.
Month of Education [hosted by EEMCS] | Recognition and rewarding talkshow [hosted by the SEG Individuals and Teams] | How to engage students (more) in on-campus education? | Applying Learning Analytics to innovate your teaching [hosted by the 4TU.CEE Teaching Community] |
17th of May to 9th of June | 31st of May, 14:00 – 16:30. | 2nd of June, 11:00 – 12:30 (lunch from 12:30-13:00) | 28th of June, 12:30 – 13:45 |
Online/on-campus | On-campus | On-campus | On-campus |
The faculty of EEMCS will be hosting the Month of Education from May to June. The theme of this month is “the future of education”, with sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Topics include Life Long Learning, Digitalisation and “Student Perspective” | “The event has the form of a 'talk-show' in which we will present various propositions. These lie for instance in the field of the effect of Recognition & Rewards for UT’s position in rankings, assessing individual and team effort, free curriculum space for students for their personal development.” | We’ve all read the headlines: it’s hard to get students to physical lecture halls. During this session we would like to create the opportunity for an open discussion between teachers and students, sharing experiences, expectations, and best practices. The goal is to combine them all in a collaborative plan for engagement in educational activities you could use the next day! The students are ready to join the conversation, are you? | Learning analytics is about measuring, collecting, analysing, and reporting data about students and the learning context, to understand and improve student learning and the context in which they learn. This meeting will identify different target groups’ questions, needs and ideas in this area (including your input), and engage in a discussion about opportunities to employ learning analytics to improve outcomes for students. A professional learning community on this theme will start after the summer. |
Have a look at the Month of Education website |
And there is more:
Workshop Shiny – Interactive visualisations in R for education and research [hosted by BDSI] | Research into Challenge-based Education: Assessment [hosted by 4TU.CEE] | Challenge Based Learning Experience [hosted by CELT] This is a great example of an activity that fits in a CPD-T (Continuing Professional Development in Teaching) plan. | SEFI conference The European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) celebrates its 50th Annual Conference in September 2022, hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · Barcelona Tech (UPC) Call for proposals is open! |
3rd of June, 13:00 – 17:00 | 22nd of June, 9:00 – 10:30 | 29th of June, 9:30 – 16:30 | September 2022 |
On-campus | Online | On-campus | Barcelona
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For details on activities by our partners, please refer to the “events” page on the website of the BMS Teaching Academy | |||
Get to know: Lara Carminati and Arnold Enklaar, and how their micro-module brings students from four countries together
Hi Lara, hi Arnold, can you tell me a bit about yourself?
I’m Lara Carminati, I’m an assistant professor in the OBCC group (Organisational Behaviour, Change management and Consultancy), I’ve been teaching at the UT now for 2,5 years. I’m the course coordinator of Change Management and Consultancy in the Global Context as well as Cross-Cultural Behaviours in the master track International Management and Consultancy, and I also teach in our IBA bachelor programme and in the Honours programmes.
I’m Arnold Enklaar, I’m a senior researcher and I’m doing research and teaching in the field of intercultural management and ethnic diversity on the work floor, for the latter subject I’m involved in the Shaping Expert Group Inclusion. I developed the master course Cross-Cultural Behaviours together with Lara and the minor “Going Dutch” that will start in September. I’m also the course coordinator of the ECIU micro-module European Cross-Cultural Experience.
Indeed, we heard you set up a ECIU module, why did you start this and what is it about?
The micro-module European Cross-Cultural Experience (ECCE) is part of ECIU, and was a pilot this year in quartile 3. Arnold: “the course is meant as a journey through various European countries and getting a taste of these different cultures and countries. It’s a short journey, just 2 EC, everybody can follow it, bachelor and master all together.” “Everyone across the whole UT”, Lara adds, “this is also where the beauty lies. Well, technically this year it was mainly open to the Dutch students…” Arnold explains: “The UT has an international student population from all over the world, but also a large portion from the region, Haaksbergen, Denekamp, Vroomshoop, they are not always experienced with cultural differences and we want exactly this group to have the opportunity to reflect on their own culture. Though, next year, we plan to open up to all students.”
The micro-module is run together with partners in Portugal, Lithuania and France, all members of the ECIU network. ECIU is a consortium of 12 members, ECIU standing for European Consortium of Innovative Universities. Arnold: “ECIU is promoting the micro-modules as a medium to broaden your world view. We were strongly invited to make a course around intercultural competencies. Now, this topic is mostly taught around dimensions (e.g., the Hofstede dimensions) but we rather wanted to let students experience the real thing. For this, we found the above 3 partners. First, the partners give four cases from the work floor and allow students to brainstorm on how to deal with these, and eventually the teacher explains what was at stake. Then, the host country gives a deepening lecture on explaining the cultural logic of the country. Lastly, the student groups come together online and reflect on their learnings and collaboration, to produce a reflection paper on that.
From your perspective as a teacher, what are advantages and disadvantages about such a “micro” module?
Arnold: “When setting up our shared master course, we had lots of freedom, now you have to work together with partners and make sure you really understand each other, it’s a real adventure. A nice adventure though, it’s a good group, we are building up good relationships.”
Lara adds: “To start with some logistical points, a very practical point was the time zone differences, since in Portugal they are for instance one hour behind, whereas in Lithuania one hour ahead. We also had to find a way not to clash with the other normal classes, not only for our students, but also for the other groups. This led to the course taking place in the evenings, that worked. It is also worth noting that the Dutch educational system is different from the other systems, for instance, French students have busy days from 8:30 to 18:30, so for them adding some extra hours after the ordinary hours was quite heavy.
A last logistical challenge was adding students to Canvas, we were the leading university for this course, so we used our own platform. This was quite a challenge in the beginning, but it smoothed out, luckily.”
Arnold: “We needed to be clear in communication to our partners that we wanted to move beyond “fun facts” to a deeper discussion on cultural behaviour, we were on the same line, but explicit communication is key in collaborative modules like this.
Although a nice idea, UT students find it difficult to fit a 2 EC unit into their regular program of 5 EC units. Students may see it as something extra, and drop out quickly if it’s too much.” Lara elaborates: “for the UT, these 2 ECs are extra, for the partner universities, the attendance of the micro-module was integrated in a course and compulsory to pass the course. This had an impact of the participation and engagement of the students. We were also the only university of the group with a quartile structure, and we somehow had to fit the other university’s calendars onto ours. A drawback from this was that we, for instance, received the list of Lithuanian students one day before we started, because different educational systems have different starting days.”
Arnold concludes “it was a really nice adventure, a great space to experiment. A micro-module is a good way to try out new didactic techniques for yourself as well.”
Have you already received student feedback?
Arnold: “we have to be frank, we started with a lot of students, but we lost many halfway. Students said they were too busy, or had another course coming up. It is connected with the point that it is, unfortunately, not directly impacting their study program so they can drop it easily. It was a pity, also for the group formation. Though, the remaining students were very positive.”
Lara adds “students also have a lot of flexibility to rewatch lectures due to the online nature of the programme, but we did notice that attendance dropped towards the exam period.”
What are your future plans with this module?
In addition to opening up to non-Dutch students and increasing the number of students, there are more plans. Arnold: “we aim to do a second edition in September, with more partners and with the long-term aim to incorporate this course into a bigger module. This is also from a funding perspective, ECIU funds the first two editions, then funding should become structural from the host organisation.” Lara: “and of course, we are gathering feedback from teachers and students to see how we can make the next edition even better.”
Lara closes: “it was a really nice experience, and as a teacher, it was also really nice to see how other teachers are doing and their relationship with their students.”
Stay in touch
Join our BMS Teaching Community teams to stay updated, interact with fellow BMS teachers and find more resources.
If you have any input, ideas or suggestions: Corrie Huijs (c.huijs@utwente.nl) and Tom Boogerd (t.c.boogerd@utwente.nl)
