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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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’…
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
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…
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”
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
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
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?
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
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
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…
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
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…
