“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…
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…
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…
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
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
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
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…
“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…
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
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…
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…
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…
