This a workshop on developing engineering students’ transversal skills
- in Brussels* on October 8th, 2024 *some workshops in French
- based on evidence from a multi-year research project
- discover open source activities that you can adapt to your own context
- a canvas for designing experiential learning activities focused on transversal skills
Who is it for?
- Professors, teachers and educational advisors who work in science and engineering in higher education
How much does it cost?
- You will be our guests for the workshop, coffee breaks and lunch. Your travel is at your expense. Support is possible for people coming from lower-income or EU expanding horizons countries; see the application for more information.
This a workshop on developing engineering students’ transversal skills
- in Vienna on October 4th
- based on evidence from a multi-year research project
- discover open source activities that you can adapt to your own context
- a canvas for designing experiential learning activities focused on transversal skills
Who is it for?
- Professors, teachers and educational advisors who work in science and engineering in higher education
How much does it cost?
- You will be our guests for the workshop, coffee breaks and lunch. Your travel is at your expense. Support is possible for people coming from lower-income or EU expanding horizons countries; see the application for more information.
Why this teacher training/course?
Higher education systems predominantly prioritize the transmission of disciplinary knowledge and technical skills. However, there is a growing acknowledgement of the need to cultivate transformative capacities that nurture individual and collective awareness, connection, insight, purpose, and agency. The training aims to bridge this gap by promoting comprehensive pedagogies that view education as pivotal driver for sustainability.
The training was developed as part of the project “Transforming Higher Education for Sustainability by Fostering Inner Dimensions of Learners” (2022-2024), funded by the International Programme of Movetia. The project united eight higher education institution from Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.S., all with a shared commitment to innovative sustainability education approaches.
Training overview
The training consists of three parts (part 1: Introduction; part 2: Experiential session; part 3: Integration of inner dimensions into educators’ professional practice). The training/course objectives are as follows:
- conceptually introduce and allow participants to explore and experience the relevance of inner dimensions for sustainability.
- experience the role of connection to self, others, and nature as a fundamental source of supporting sustainability.
- equip participants with practical methods, exercises, and resources for incorporating inner dimensions into their courses and teaching practices.
- encourage collaboration and peer learning among participants, creating a supportive network of educators committed to sustainability and associated inner development.
Target group
The training is designed for Higher Education faculty from diverse disciplines who are interested in integrating sustainability into their courses or enhancing their sustainability-related teaching approaches.
Join us
We are excited to pilot this training with faculty teaching at Swiss Higher Education. Your participation will not only provide you with invaluable insights but also contribute to the further co-creation and refinement of the training. All training material will later be shared on an Open Educational Resource Platform. The training will take place at the University of Bern (in-person only):
- Thursday, 10 October 2024, 13:15-17:15
- Thursday, 17 October 2024, 13:15-17:15
Participation is free and limited to 20 people (first come first serve basis).
You can register your interest here. More information will follow in due time.
Why this teacher training/course?
Higher education systems predominantly prioritize the transmission of disciplinary knowledge and technical skills. However, there is a growing acknowledgement of the need to cultivate transformative capacities that nurture individual and collective awareness, connection, insight, purpose, and agency. The training aims to bridge this gap by promoting comprehensive pedagogies that view education as pivotal driver for sustainability.
The training was developed as part of the project “Transforming Higher Education for Sustainability by Fostering Inner Dimensions of Learners” (2022-2024), funded by the International Programme of Movetia. The project united eight higher education institution from Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the U.S., all with a shared commitment to innovative sustainability education approaches.
Training overview
The training consists of three parts (part 1: Introduction; part 2: Experiential session; part 3: Integration of inner dimensions into educators’ professional practice). The training/course objectives are as follows:
- conceptually introduce and allow participants to explore and experience the relevance of inner dimensions for sustainability.
- experience the role of connection to self, others, and nature as a fundamental source of supporting sustainability.
- equip participants with practical methods, exercises, and resources for incorporating inner dimensions into their courses and teaching practices.
- encourage collaboration and peer learning among participants, creating a supportive network of educators committed to sustainability and associated inner development.
Target group
The training is designed for Higher Education faculty from diverse disciplines who are interested in integrating sustainability into their courses or enhancing their sustainability-related teaching approaches.
Join us
We are excited to pilot this training with faculty teaching at Swiss Higher Education. Your participation will not only provide you with invaluable insights but also contribute to the further co-creation and refinement of the training. All training material will later be shared on an Open Educational Resource Platform. The training will take place at the University of Bern (in-person only):
- Thursday, 10 October 2024, 13:15-17:15
- Thursday, 17 October 2024, 13:15-17:15
Participation is free and limited to 20 people (first come first serve basis).
You can register your interest here. More information will follow in due time.
10h-11h Depression in STEM: How research and teaching affect depression among graduate students and faculty in STEM (Hybrid Talk):
There is a mental health crisis in STEM, yet few studies have explored the experiences of individuals in STEM with mental health struggles. In this talk, we present the results of multiple studies that highlight how individuals with depression navigate the complexities of academia and how aspects of academia can exacerbate and alleviate symptoms of depression. We highlight how over 25% of faculty report struggling with depression, yet less than 5% of them are open with students about their depression. Finally, we show how an instructor revealing that they have depression to their students can positively affect students, particularly students who struggle with depression.
14h-15h How to make academic STEM spaces more inclusive:
Drs. Cooper and Brownell will lead an informal discussion on designing and implementing studies to explore inclusivity in academic spaces, drawing on their extensive expertise. This discussion will be of interest to teachers, researchers, and administrators who are interested in conducting large or small scale studies in their own contexts.
More about the speakers:
Sara Brownell is a President’s Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and directs the Research for Inclusive STEM Education (RISE) Center. Trained as a Ph.D. neuroscientist, she transitioned to discipline-based education research and is an expert on course-based undergraduate research experiences and making undergraduate science learning experiences, specifically active learning courses and undergraduate research experiences, more inclusive. She currently explores the experiences of instructors and students with concealable stigmatized identities such as disability, LGBTQ+ identity, religion, and income level. She has over 100 publications and her work has received international attention through news outlets.
Katelyn Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. Trained as a discipline-based education researcher, she uses quantitative and qualitative methodologies to explore research questions related to making undergraduate and graduate biology education more inclusive. Her work primarily focuses on the relationship between student mental health and cognitive and affective learning. Her research has been highlighted in Science as well as news outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, and BBC News. In 2022, Cooper received the NSF CAREER award to investigate the relationship between undergraduate/graduate research and depression, and was listed as one of the 2022 NBC PRIDE 30: The new generation for her efforts to make biology education more inclusive.
Formative feedback enhances learning outcomes, helping individuals assess and improve their performance. In higher education, however, delivering timely and personalized feedback is challenging due to large and diverse student populations, often leading to delays and generalized responses. Recent advances in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) provide a promising solution by enabling scalable and immediate feedback tailored to individual learning needs.
In this lunch&LEARN session, Tatjana Nazaretsky (Machine Learning for Education Laboratory) will discuss a comprehensive study conducted at EPFL with 457 students across multiple disciplines, focusing on integrating generative AI into educational feedback systems.
It examines students’ perceptions of AI-generated versus human-created feedback and the impact of revealing the feedback source on their evaluations.
The findings indicate that the identity of the feedback provider significantly influences student preferences and perceptions, affecting their receptivity to the feedback.
The session will explore these outcomes and their implications for developing and implementing AI-based feedback systems in higher education. It will particularly emphasize the critical role of human factors in successfully integrating and accepting AI technologies and suggest specific strategies for institutions to enhance transparency and build trust in AI systems, providing actionable insights for improving educational practices with AI.
Oral exams, i.e., one-on-one interview-style questioning by an instructor, are powerful tools for assessing conceptual mastery because of their adaptive dialogic nature. Additionally, beyond merely measuring understanding, they have the potential to actively shape students’ learning strategies, foster reflection on learning and provide instructors with unique insights, making them invaluable components of pedagogical practice. However, concerns regarding validity and bias, but especially scalability to large class sizes often limits their adoption.
In this lunch&LEARN session, Curt Schurgers will share the results of a recent three-year NSF-funded study at the University of California, San Diego, in which a multi-PI team investigated the use of oral exams in large-enrollment engineering courses as a complement to other assessment approaches.
He will discuss the benefits of oral exams and their impacts on student performance and student motivation. He will also provide general insights, implementation strategies and various practical approaches on how to overcome the scaling issue.
About the speaker: Curt Schurgers is a Teaching Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His focus is on undergraduate course development, active learning/flipped classrooms, engineering pedagogy, and research experiences for undergraduate students. He also serves as the Faculty Director of the Envision Maker Studio and co-directs Engineers for Exploration (E4E), a program in which undergraduates tackle real-world engineering design challenges in exploration and conservation, and create technologies in collaboration with ecologists, archaeologists and other scientists. He received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Note: This event is hybrid and open to anyone who teaches at EPFL.
The use of chatbots like ChatGPT in education raises questions about their effect on teaching and learning, especially in terms of integrating them effectively.
In this session, Jérôme Brender, PhD student at the Mobile Robotic Systems Group (MOBOTS), will present his research which delves into the impact of ChatGPT on student performance and learning within a graduate-level robotics course, analyzing data from 64 students (40 who used ChatGPT and 24 who did not).
He will go over his findings and the three distinct behaviors that emerged, namely, the « debuggers », the « conceptual explorers » and the « practical developers ».
Please note:
- This session will be hybrid.
- Register at the link on the right.
- This event is geared towards anyone who teaches at EPFL.
The goal of Project Ethel is to build an AI-based open-source virtual teaching assistant for courses at ETH Zurich and elsewhere, which can support students and lecturers by holding office hours (“chat”), providing feedback on assessments, and pre-grading assignments.
Toward that end, artifacts generated or collected within a course, such as lecture scripts, slides, lecture recordings, homework assignments, and library materials, will be collected and made available in a learning content management system, processed through input pipelines, and used to augment inputs to standard Large Language Models.
The talk presents a number of feasibility studies for different aspects of Ethel and discusses preliminary experiences from pilot studies within a handful of courses.
Gerd Kortemeyer is a member of the Rectorate and AI Center of ETH Zurich, as such, he spearheads initiatives to integrate Artificial Intelligence into Higher Education.
Jupyter Notebooks are interactive documents that combine text with pieces of code and their execution results.
In this workshop, participants will experience learning discipline-specific content with a notebook in the EPFL centralized Jupyter Lab platform (https://noto.epfl.ch) and work on the design of a notebook-based interactive textbook or exercise worksheet for their course or their MOOC.
This is an on-campus workshop.
Participants will need a laptop with internet connection to participate in the activities proposed during the workshop.
Please register here for more details.
Dr. Michele Magno, Head of the Center for Project-Based Learning at ETH, will introduce the Center and explore the three-stage education model that progressively familiarizes students with PBL by exposing them to growing project complexity from their first year of bachelor’s degree to their last year of master’s degree.
Dr. Victoria Abou-Khalil, Scientist at the Computer-Human Interaction Lab for Learning & Instruction (CHILI) and former researcher at ETH’s Center for Project-Based Learning, will present the experiences of the students with this approach and the effectiveness of PBL in exposing them to professional skills.
In this lunch&LEARN session, Helena Kovacs, Project Manager at the Transversal Skills and Career Center (formerly scientist at Center LEARN’s internal mission), and Tamara Milosevic, Head of the Transversal Skills and Career Center will present an in-depth analysis of transversal skills at EPFL from three perspectives: planned, taught, and learnt.
With data collected from five distinct sources within one master course, their study examines the written curriculum as presented in the syllabus, the taught curriculum with data from the teacher interview and the teaching materials, and the learnt curriculum as coded from students portfolios.
This approach seeks to gauge to what extent the three parts of the curriculum are aligned and what that means in terms of course development and teaching and learning transversal skills
