PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: Modernizing our teaching tools

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands.

These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands.

If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better – and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic!

Last month, I wrote about modernizing the contents of our courses. Today, I will focus on the tools we use for teaching.

During the pandemic we had to be creative – and we had to modernize our teaching tools whether we wanted it or not. I had to make the leap from teaching whiteboard and marker, to teaching online, using quizzes, and trying out all the bells and whistles.

Now that we have been able to digest the pandemic, and the good and bad aspects of all our adventures with teaching tools, we can think better about how we can modernize our teaching tools. Here are ways in which we can modernize how we deliver content:

1. COIL: Collaborative Online International Learning is a methodology that allows for professors from different universities to collaborate and let their students work together. I am fascinated by the idea, and have applied to get my course offered in COIL with another university, but so far, I have not yet had the chance to try it out.
2. Site and lab visits: Perhaps not “modern”, but I cannot write about teaching tools that make our teaching more interactive, more accessible, and more hands-on for our students without mentioning site and lab visits. If the students can do an actual experiment in the lab, it gets even more hands-on.
3. Online notebooks: Some of my colleagues prepare notebooks for the students, sometimes also called “skeleton notes”, that help students structure their notes, practice aspects of the material, and be actively involved. These notes can be printed out, but more and more, we see a shift to, for example, Jupyter notebooks.
4. Quizzes: We played games during the pandemic. Fun games, boring games, educational games, and games with no point at all. All in all, I think I have learned how to create a fun quiz, and I still use Quizziz to play with my students, as well as Edpuzzles.
5. Online guest lectures: The pandemic made collaborations easier, so now it is more common to ask a colleague in a different location to provide a guest lecture for our class – either during the class time, during an event, or through a recording.
6. Online courses: I am exploring the use of embedding online courses, via our Coursera for Campus program, to teach specific skills to my students. This semester, they are learning about prompt engineering with ChatGPT through a Vanderbilt course, and I am asking them in their essay homeworks to reflect on their use of generative AI in the assignment, discuss their prompts, and explain their fact-checking.
7. Pair with other course: Similar to the COIL idea, we can foster collaborative learning by pairing our students with another course. A typical example is when we pair our structural engineering students with architecture students to work on a design assignment.
8. Practical assignments: Just like site and lab visits, we have to remember that assignments in which students learn from real-life cases are often the ones that will stick best to their memory because of the stories case studies tell us. So, regardless of all the bells and whistles of modern tools, we should also keep an eye on good practical assignments and case studies.

Which tools have you used to update your teaching?