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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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….
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,…
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…
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…
