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…
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…
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…