“Arguing” with Arguments: An Assignment on Academic Debate for Bachelor and Master Students

“Arguing” with Arguments: An Assignment on Academic Debate for Bachelor and Master Students

By Karin Bijsterveld & Sophie Vanhoonacker In times of increased societal polarisation and cultural diversity, an open academic debate with mutual respect for differences in opinion cannot always be taken for granted. With its emphasis on active learning, Problem Based…

What happens when you bring students and staff together to talk about inclusivity and diversity?

What happens when you bring students and staff together to talk about inclusivity and diversity?

By the FASoS Student Representatives’ DIAS working group, Robyn Ausmeier and Mirko Reithler On March 6, 2024, we hosted a two-hour workshop on “Inclusivity-Based Learning” at FASoS. The event was an initiative of the Diversity, Inclusivity, Accessibility, and Sustainability (DIAS)…

Navigating the digital and AI era in education: insights from UNESCO's Digital Learning Week

Navigating the digital and AI era in education: insights from UNESCO’s Digital Learning Week

By Sjoerd Stoffels Thinking of UNESCO, many might not realise that the organisation plays a significant role in the field of digital technology and education. It engages in a wide range of activities, including policy development and advocacy, establishment of…

Student Advising at FASoS

Student Advising at FASoS

By Pia Harbers, Saskia van Bergen, Miranda van den Boorn & Raf Widdershoven As FASoS student advisers, we are involved in all stages of the student life cycle, from Open Days and Introduction to MA choice, and career planning. At…

Learning from similarities and differences: Reflections on a trip to Maastricht University

Learning from similarities and differences: Reflections on a trip to Maastricht University

By Christopher Huggins In February 2023 I had the privilege of visiting FASoS at Maastricht University as part of an (Covid-19 delayed) Erasmus+ staff mobility. The University of Suffolk (my home institution) and Maastricht University are very different. Suffolk is…

Teaching research methods and the dilemmas of structuring student research papers

Teaching research methods and the dilemmas of structuring student research papers

By Tullio Viola When I started my supervision activity at FASoS a couple of years ago, I noticed something I wasn’t anticipating. In comparison to other institutions where I had previously worked, students were paying much more attention to making…

Are you talking to me? The rise of chatbots in education

Are you talking to me? The rise of chatbots in education

By Sjoerd Stoffels The latest buzz word in the world of education is ChatGPT. This type of artificial intelligence (AI) produces credible texts in a matter of seconds that are often usable for book reports, essays, and other assignments. The…

“How on earth did I miss this?”: On handing over teaching coordination tasks

“How on earth did I miss this?”: On handing over teaching coordination tasks

By Karin Bijsterveld Anyone who has ever taken over the course coordination from someone else or started directing a teaching programme will likely remember the very first year. No matter how well you thought you knew the course or the…

Teaching-Research Integration

Teaching-Research Integration

By Patrick Bijsmans & Sally Wyatt The way in which our curricula are designed means that we are not always able to teach subjects that exactly fit our research expertise. Even though commitment to interdisciplinarity and PBL are very persuasive reasons for this, some of us…

Using games to activate students in PBL: Reflections from a CPD workshop

Using games to activate students in PBL: Reflections from a CPD workshop

By Patrick Bijsmans & Anna Harris One of the key characteristics of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is its emphasis – or even dependence – on active student engagement. One way of activating students in such a context is the use of…

How to make peer feedback a constructive group effort

How to make peer feedback a constructive group effort

By Yf Reykers Peer feedback is often included in courses as a tool for collaborative learning. Yet, is it always so collaborative and constructive? In theory, providing comments on another student’s assignment and engaging with the comments from peers is…

Learning while cleaning the house: Some reflections on using podcasts in teaching

Learning while cleaning the house: Some reflections on using podcasts in teaching

By Patrick Bijsmans & Andreea Nǎstase Podcasts are rapidly becoming an important medium, with over 400 million podcast listeners worldwide projected for this year. Search for “podcast higher education” in Spotify and you’ll find yourself scrolling for quite a while…

Taking students virtually to Brussels

Taking students virtually to Brussels

By Paul Stephenson How do you organise a student trip to the EU institutions in the middle of a global pandemic? What do you when you can’t cross the border to Belgium? How do you cope when the Commission and…

Technology-Enhanced Learning @ FASoS

By the Technology-Enhanced Learning Taskforce We are just over two years into a pandemic that has changed our world in many different ways, not least when it comes to teaching and learning in higher education. This is reflected in an…

On thesis supervision meetings

On thesis supervision meetings

By Karin Bijsterveld A few years ago, I changed my way of organising individual thesis supervision meetings with BA and MA students. I know I am not the only one—I heard other teachers talking about similar ‘systems,’ but newcomers might…

Attendance matters!

Attendance matters!

By Merijn Chamon As course coordinator and tutor for the only mandatory law course in the Bachelor in European Studies, I typically start the course with a clear message to students: Law as a discipline has its own language and…

Role-play in PBL: Experiencing course content

Role-play in PBL: Experiencing course content

By Ragna Zeiss As a teacher, I am always keen to engage with new teaching and learning formats. While preparing for the Globalisation and Development (GDS) course ‘Science and Technology Studies for Development in a Global Context’, I encountered an…

On the use and abuse of “evidence based policy”, lessons from teaching philosophy in coronatijd

By Darian Meacham As the Netherlands goes into another light lockdown, UM staff and students are again dealing with a changing landscape of public health policy regulations and recommendations, with these come tough philosophical questions. In September when we returned…

Emily Levine on the Hard Compromises behind Academic Innovation

Emily Levine on the Hard Compromises behind Academic Innovation

By Patrick Bijsmans FASoS assistant professor and editor of RevDem Ferenc Laczó recently met with Emily Levine (Stanford University) to discuss key ideas in her new book Allies and rivals: German-American exchange and the rise of the modern research university….

Let’s talk about teaching assistants and ‘Erkennen & Waarderen’

By Patrick Bijsmans When our BA European Studies (ES) started in 2002, I embarked on a job as teaching assistant at FASoS. A crazy time, but also a fun and rewarding one. I was the only teaching assistant back then….

In search of the holy grade: Evaluating (under)graduate theses

In search of the holy grade: Evaluating (under)graduate theses

By Johan Adriaensen The (under)graduate thesis is a challenging exercise not only due to its length, but also due to its unstructured format. There is no pre-determined set of questions that require answering, no pre-defined theory or method to arrive…

What happens when a FASoS tutor suddenly becomes a student again?  Reflections from the other side of the lectern

What happens when a FASoS tutor suddenly becomes a student again? Reflections from the other side of the lectern

By Elsje Fourie This has been an upside-down year in all sorts of ways, and I’m no exception. After more than a decade on the other side of the classroom, I suddenly found myself cast in the role of a…

Three lessons learned on how to use online components in a (post-)pandemic teaching environment

Three lessons learned on how to use online components in a (post-)pandemic teaching environment

By Clara Weinhardt As another academic year shaped by online teaching is coming to an end, everybody is longing to bringing education back to our campuses. While we may not like it, we currently do not know with certainty in…

Transnational reflections on online teaching and learning

Transnational reflections on online teaching and learning

By Patrick Bijsmans & Simon Lightfoot It’s been over 15 months since we’ve had to suddenly move our courses online. A time during which we have learned many new things about synchronous versus asynchronous learning, about the technicalities of Microsoft…

Analogue becomes digital: An educationalists’ perspective on teaching and learning in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

Analogue becomes digital: An educationalists’ perspective on teaching and learning in times of the COVID-19 pandemic

By Diede Diederiks In March 2020, I started working at FASoS as an educationalist. It seemed like a clear job, working at the educational policy department on a couple of ongoing projects. How little did I know about the changes…

How Englishisation is changing higher education

How Englishisation is changing higher education

By René Gabriëls & Robert Wilkinson The Englishisation of education and research attracts worldwide interest – not just from scholars, but also among the general public. Englishisation can be defined as the process in which the English language is increasingly…

Pre-lecture surveys: Activating students before class

By Yf Reykers Kahoot, Mentimeter, Wooclap, Gosoapbox. Does this sound familiar? These digital platforms are nowadays part of our standard teaching toolbox, perhaps even more so after a year of online teaching. But no matter how interactive, much of students’…

“In God we trust, all others must bring data”: Introducing BA DS students to quantitative data analyses, R programming and Big Data

“In God we trust, all others must bring data”: Introducing BA DS students to quantitative data analyses, R programming and Big Data

By Eliyahu Sapir & Thomas Frissen In January 2021, second-year BA Digital Society students followed an intensive introduction to big data analysis. Students were trained in quantitative data analyses and using R and RStudio in an earlier course. They employed…

S/He said what? Managing interaction and feedback along an MA thesis trajectory

S/He said what? Managing interaction and feedback along an MA thesis trajectory

By Lauren Wagner; graphics by Pinelopi Kaslama The students of this year’s MA Globalisation and Development Studies (GDS) have just rounded up Period 3 working on their MA thesis proposals. As they finished the thesis development course, I heard from…

Designing a new course in and beyond COVID-19 times

Designing a new course in and beyond COVID-19 times

By Patrick Bijsmans PBL course design is a recurring topic in academic literature, but also in staff development. This concerns, for instance, applying general PBL principles to assignment design, but also the need for varying assignments. The design process is…

The future higher education supermarket

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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”

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…