Inter TU Study Days revived: report of the first AMI Education Day
On Monday May 19, the first AMI Education Day took place. Our primary goal for this event was to revive the very successful Inter TU Study Days, an annual 4TU.AMI event which ran from 2013 to 2019. The long-term vision is to establish the AMI Education Day as one of the key educational events in the Netherlands regarding mathematics teaching in higher education.
Around 60 participants joined the event in Utrecht, which guaranteed a full and inspiring day. We exchanged many new ideas, shared our practices, and discussed some major challenges regarding mathematics teaching in higher education. Since the last Inter TU Study day in 2019 many things changed, and we wanted to catch up with all new developments!
From bridging courses to student engagement
The line-up was amazing. Brendan Kelly, who is Director of Introductory Mathematics at Harvard University, gave an overview of his work and vision on how educators can develop engaging calculus courses. He is visiting the Netherlands upon an invitation of our Strategic Research Initiative MEReP. In the coming weeks he will be visiting the five applied mathematics institutes involved in the 4TU.AMI centre.
Annoesjka Cabo, Professor in Statistics for Innovation in Education at TU Delft, gave an overview of the ongoing SRI MEReP on educational research. She stipulated two important aspects university study programs should consider. Mathematics courses are part of many university study programs, hence it is very important to support first-year students in the transition from high school to university mathematics education. Moreover, she discussed the importance of doing research in the effectiveness of various educational practices. The new version of the Mathematics Education Network MathEdN was also presented. MathEdN aims at sharing experiences between lecturers and educational researchers.Â
Following Annoesjka's talk, Bart van den Vries (TU Delft), Frederic Schuller (UT), TamĂĄs Görbe (RUG) and Valente Ramirez (WUR) took over and gave a short overview of some educational projects at their universities. The educational practices they discussed involved using online tools to support teaching, how to motivate students and help them grow during their learning, and how to structure courses using methods like âflipping the classroomâ and âbuilding thinking classroomsâ.Â
Online education and innovative assessment
Using software in teaching and assessment can have a great impact on student learning and performance. In the past years many new projects have explored this area. We invited speakers to give short overviews of the tools they use and how they foster student learning.Â
Beryl van Gelderen and Tom Vroegrijk (TU Delft) gave an overview of the PRIME program, showed how it has grown from a test project to a university-broad program, and shared their future goals. Robert van Kints and Ruedi Seiler from Integral-learning gave a presentation about the teaching and learning platform Mumie, which was originally developed in Germany but has also been used recently at the TU Delft. André Heck, Ellen den Ouden and Marthe Schut from the University of Amsterdam showed how they use SOWISO to facilitate the mathematics courses for 45 study programs in the Faculty of Sciences. They also offer a broad collection of open courses you can explore. To conclude, Jim Portegies from the TU/e gave an overview of his work with Waterproof, an educational proof assistant he uses in the first-year Analysis course he teaches.
The recent revolution regarding proof assistants shows that there is a huge momentum in this direction, the future looks bright!
Alternative assessment methods
To conclude, we couldnât omit recent innovations in assessment methods. Nelly Litvak (TU/e) and Tracy Craig (UT) showcased some innovative assessment methods and discussed the general principles behind them. The common message: we should try to develop assessment methods which enhance student engagement and learning!
