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…
“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…
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…
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
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…
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…
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…
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’…
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,…
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…
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,…
On a mission: helping students to make better use of the pre-discussion
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…
Course evaluation, what is it good for?
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…
Problem-based learning for teaching political ecology?
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…
PBL – People Based Learning?
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…
Using word association to assess learning in the BA ES
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…
Grading known students: An (unacknowledged) challenge for PBL assessment
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…
Peeking into the classroom – PBL Movie Night at FASoS
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…
Young and female? A recipe for poorer teaching evaluations
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…
One year of blogging about teaching and learning in PBL
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…
The Expert Lecture in Problem-Based Learning
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?…
Stressed from teaching so many stressed students?
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…
What place for lectures in the Problem-Based Learning process?
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…
Using writing in PBL: Less talking – more ideas
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…
The erosion of PBL at FASoS?
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…
For the times they are complex–Why PBL is more relevant than ever
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…
To use or not to use the whiteboard? Is that the question?
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…
