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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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,…
By Jasmijn van der Most When I was a student in the Bachelor in European Studies (BA ES), I thought that a PBL pre-discussion worked as follows: you read the assignment text, scan it for difficult words, and you put…
By Elizabeth Olsson For the last two years, I have worked as a writing coach in one of the largest introductory courses offered by the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The course is Introduction to…
By Matthijs Krooi A few months ago, this blog featured an excellent post about bias in teaching evaluations, especially with regard to age and gender. It is a sobering story about a practice of performance measurement that is very common…
By Patrick Bijsmans (Maastricht University) and Arjan Schakel (University of Bergen) The abolishment of minimum attendance requirements at FASoS just over two years ago has been a recurring topic of discussion. Literature on students’ persistence and results often highlights attendance…
By Nick Kirsop-Taylor and Dan Appiah In this blogpost we report on a recent paper we gave at the Joint International teaching and learning Conference (2019) in Brighton (UK) about using Problem-based learning (PBL) as an approach to teaching and…
By Kirstin Herbst and Sarah Goosens As second-year students in the Bachelor European Studies, we can look back on two years of experience with Problem Based Learning (PBL). PBL has both fostered our knowledge and taught us many skills. We…
By Paul Stephenson My experience of teaching Area Studies in the BA European Studies is that, once you move beyond the initial tour de table that maps what we know based on basic assumptions and personal experiences, the group has little idea…
By Nora Vaage Before I came to Maastricht in 2016 I worked in the Norwegian university system. There, exams at the BA and MA level (preceding the MA thesis) were graded blindly by two examiners. Coming to Maastricht University, where…
By Vincent Bijman In Dutch secondary education, one effective tool to facilitate reflection on pedagogical and didactical strategies is the use of classroom video footage to support discussions between teaching staff. Video footage is also a useful tool for PBL…
By Constance Sommerey & Afke Groen Teaching evaluations. After a course has ended, we await these sensitive comments in at times anxious, at times happy anticipation. We are interested to find out whether the changes we made to a course…
By Patrick Bijsmans & Afke Groen It has been a year since we started our Teaching & Learning Blog! And what better way to celebrate than with a blog of our own about the importance of sharing teaching experiences and…
By Michael Shackleton In Problem-Based Learning environments such as the one in Maastricht, lectures by “experts” or “practitioners” are often considered to be of great added value. But what can the practitioner actually offer to students in a university environment?…
By Pia Harbers Media have been reporting about increased levels of stress and psychological problems among students in Higher Education. While some question to what extent this really is a serious problem, others describe this as the “biggest generational challenge” that we are…
By Patrick Bijsmans “Learning how to do research is one of the most important tasks at the university. It is also one of the most challenging.” (Murtonen & Lehtinen, ‘Learning to be a researcher’, in Academic research and researchers) Academic…
By Afke Groen My first lecture at university was a nightmare. I thought I had prepared well. I had extensively read the assigned material, and had completely based the lecture on that. If I would just stand behind the microphone…
By John Harbord The typical PBL session: some students talk, some are silent – are the silent ones not contributing because they didn’t do the reading, because they are shy, or why? It’s often hard to tell. Some show off…
By Patrick Bijsmans & Mirko Reithler Problem-based learning (PBL) is at the heart of teaching at Maastricht University and at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS). It is a student-centred approach to learning: students encounter problems that contextualise a…
By Martin Wirtz & Lasse Gerrits While Problem-Based Learning (PBL) still has an innovative air around it compared to traditional university teaching, it can hardly be claimed that it is “new”. Yet, we contend that PBL is more relevant than…
By Sven Schaepkens & Patrick Bijsmans FASoS teaching staff sometimes informally meet to share experience. One such event took place on 7 November 2017. A group of new and experienced staff watched the UM DVD Problem based learning: Tips from…
By Afke Groen & Patrick Bijsmans Study choice is a topical issue; for students, who want to choose a programme that suits them well, and for universities, whose financing partly depends on students’ enrolment in and successful completion of their…
By Esther Versluis After some 13 years of supervising theses in the Bachelor in European Studies (BA ES), I think I would best describe this part of my job as being some sort of motivational coach. I feel the most…
By Philip Post Engaging students is important in any educational context, but is crucial to a proper working of Problem-Based Learning. In our system, students are in control of the learning process and the participation of the students therefore largely…
