The future higher education supermarket
By Talisha Schilder “Flexible bachelor”, “tailor your own study programme” and “freedom to pursue your own interests” are examples of how universities promote curriculum flexibility on their websites. Student-customers scroll, or let’s say stroll, through the online syllabus aisles to…
Tutorials in times of pandemic: Active participation and interaction in online education
By Swantje Falcke and Marie Labussière Last Spring, the courses taught in period 5 had to be moved online within a matter of days. Although challenging under these circumstances, adapting to online teaching has led to a great range of…
Storytelling in the PBL classroom
By Maud Oostindie When we discuss the PBL classroom, we cannot but address group dynamics. Although group dynamics are important to many types of education- and learning practices, they are especially central to PBL, with its focus on constructive, collaborative,…
Who’s afraid of DIY video in education?
By Sjoerd Stoffels Using video in education has become part of teaching reality during recent months. Moving from on-campus to online teaching and learning, accelerated developments that were already literally ‘visual’ in educational organisations on a global scale for quite…
Fast forward and rewind: Using videos in teaching and learning
By Patrick Bijsmans Throughout the last couple of months I have joined several national and international webinars, observed colleagues’ online tutorials and lectures, and read several blogs and papers to inform myself about online teaching and learning. This includes excellent…
Expectations, availability and learning: Online teaching and learning in the Maastricht Science Programme
By Stefan Jongen After reading Mirko Reithler’s blog post, I was thinking about how to build a boat for my teaching in period 5 of the Maastricht Science Programme, a bachelor programme that is offered by the Faculty of Science…
Zooming into online teaching and learning: An interview with Marisa Mori and Mirko Reithler
By Patrick Bijsmans After weeks of online teaching and learning, you may be totally Zoompt and perhaps you have even developed a case of Zoomophobia. Inversely, you may have become a Zoomophile who looks back at the pre-Zoom age with…
Political Philosophy online in “Coronatijd”
By Darian Meacham The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk, Hegel wrote in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820). He meant that philosophy, and thinking in general, arrives late on the scene…
Tales from my home office III: Sowing the seeds
By Patrick Bijsmans One of the few good things about the the need to stay at and work from home, is that we’ve managed to get a lot of work done in the garden. We’ve enlarged one of the borders,…
To print or not to print? That is the question
By Paul Stephenson So we have just started period 5 and I have a stack of assessments to do of individual papers, group papers and take-home exams from across the BA and MA programmes. Ordinarily I would print the papers, grade them…
Zoom…Much Ado About Nothing?
By Sjoerd Stoffels The launch of Zoom at Maastricht University took many of us by surprise. A launch that also lacked necessary information regarding the ins and outs of this application. The result of this information vacuum: turmoil among staff and…
Building the boat while sailing
By Mirko Reithler I am a complete novice to online teaching. Embarking on this journey with hasty preparations seems like a daunting task that reminded me of the saying “building the boat while sailing”. Googling the expression, I discovered a…
Tales from my home office II: The rise of the online teacher
By Patrick Bijsmans We are now in week 3 of online teaching and learning here in Maastricht. Last week I posted some first reflections on my own experience so far, and I want to come back to this again. But…
New editorial team FASoS Teaching & Learning Blog
By Patrick Bijsmans It must have been about 15 months ago when, after a meeting with a group of faculty colleagues interested in teaching and learning research, Afke Groen and I started to think about launching a teaching and learning…
Studying curriculum design in European Studies
By Johan Adriaensen & Caterina Pozzi Curriculum design is the backbone of programmes in Higher Education and the framework within which all teaching and learning take place. Surprisingly, there is relatively little comparative research on curriculum designs within the Scholarship of…
Reflections on one week of working at home with 1 husband, 2 kids and 1 cat
By Esther Versluis Expectations beforehand As horrible as the situation is, particularly for those who are really influenced by the pandemic either health- or workwise, for us – academics with kids – it might actually be a nice opportunity…
Tales from my home office I
By Patrick Bijsmans It’s been just over a week since Maastricht University decided to move all teaching online. I’ve been lucky because my teaching from last week onwards was going to be centred around individual meetings anyway, so it’s been…
COVID19 and online education in the MA European Studies
By Andreea Nastase, Petar Petrov, Maarten Vink and Hylke Dijkstra Following the university’s decision to suspend in-class education, we decided to move our MA European Studies courses online per Monday 16 March. We want to share our experiences, as novices…
Ten tips for FASoS BA students as we move to online education
Prepared by BA Programme Directors, Coordinator for Continuing Professional Development, and FASoS Student Representatives, 18 March 2020 FASoS students already know a lot about independent learning and self-directed study. You can do this! Here are some tips to help…
How to make the best of online individual feedback through Skype
By John Harbord The coronavirus has forced us all, without much preparation, to switch to online teaching. But what about online individual feedback? Synchronous conversation is often more effective than asynchronous written feedback, so maybe you want to talk to…
Using videos in teaching: Love (teaching) in the time of Corona
By Emilie Sitzia As teaching staff we have been discussing the use of video in teaching for many years already. Actually, the first investigations into the use of videos in the classroom go back to the 1970s… I have been…
“Dear course coordinator, I can do this better than you”
By Yf Reykers We have all been there, working under the coordination of someone we think is not acting efficiently. It is easy to believe that we can do something better than someone else. Until you face the challenge yourself….
Performing PBL: the importance of creating atmosphere
By Maud Oostindie & Robin Schormans The PBL-classroom is not only a site of learning, but also a site of performance; a metaphorical stage, in which individuals perform certain roles. The student, scribe, chair and tutor play their respective parts…
Designing for atmospheres of learning
By Anna Harris, Shanti Sumartojo and Sally Wyatt On 22 October 2019, about 30 people gathered together in the FASoS attic for a sensory and design ethnography workshop in order to explore the places in which we learn and teach,…
