News

During the annual SEFI conference 2015 in Orleans, five papers from 3TU.CEE were presented. The papers are currently available on our website.

“If you want to do something complex, you need to keep it simple!”

The 3TU.CEE-project 'Investigating Interdisciplinary Engineering Education' looks into the current state of affairs around interdisciplinarity at the three universities of technology. Interdisciplinary engineering education is currently seen as a fruitful way to prepare contemporary students to become engineers of the future. The first question that immediately comes to mind is about the definition of 'interdisciplinary'. And also, how does interdisciplinary relate to notions of multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary?

Currently interesting projects are being developed at our 3 technical universities. A group of researchers at TU Eindhoven is researching Multi-Disciplinary Course Assessment while Marco Lub's PhD research focusses on the future urbanism education. A pilot at the University of Twente with Applied Mathematics will investigate to what extent digital testing is possible without losing quality.

One of the main goals of 3TU.CEE is the dissemination of knowledge about Engineering Education. One way we do this, is by building a PhD-network. Numerous PhD students are conducting research within Higher Engineering Education, but they are rarely familiar with each other’s research. 3TU.CEE has taken the initiative to make an overview of these (former) students and their thesis.

This November Harvard Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Eric Mazur will visit the Netherlands. Four Dutch universities will welcome this renowned physicist and educator between November 23rd and November 26th to discuss and share developments and innovations in education, teaching and learning. ‘Tour de Mazur’ is an inspiring event for the academic community in the Netherlands with topics that focus on: Team-Based Learning, Project-Based Teaching, the Converted Classroom and Assessment as a Silent Killer of Learning. Many more is on the programme about which you can find information on the website.

Educational innovations at Higher Engineering Education. That is the subject of the 3TU.CEE's Innovation map project team. Chantal Brans (TU/e), Dury Bayram-Jacobs (TU Delft) and Hans van den Berg (UT) constitute the team. The aim of the project is to stimulate engineering education innovations in our own institutions and to share knowledge about these innovations with the wider university engineering community. For the purpose of inspiration of engineering teachers, we have to date already collected some thirty 3TU cases, available as “Innovation Map” items on the 3TU.CEE website.

Educational innovation is high on the TU/e agenda. Lecturers often have good ideas in their daily work but tend to have limited resources to actively pursue them. So to facilitate lecturers to do this, TU/e has organized the Innovation Call for four successive years. To support educational innovation ideas TU/e has also organized the Innovation Call. Chantal Brans, coordinator of the 3TU.CEE in Eindhoven explains: “The innovation call enables lecturers to submit experiments that can improve education in an innovative way. The plans that get selected can count on financial support and on supervision during the process. Recent years have seen nine projects supported."

Learn more about engineering education innovations and their implementation at our first TU/e Educational Innovation day, organized by the TU/e and the 3TU.Centre for Engineering Education. Get inspired by expert keynote speaker professor Marc de Vries (TU/e alumnus, TU Delft), innovative colleagues and workshops on different topics such as blended learning and peer feedback.

At the University of Twente, the Education Day 2015 will take place on Tuesday November 3rd (in the afternoon). The complete programme will be in English. We want to offer a varied programme: inspirational and practical how-to workshops, a key-note and a think tank. Whether you like practical examples you can immediately work with, or you want to have food for thought: we’re aiming to offer it all. Central theme of the Education Day will be the question how to motivate and engage students in there learning process. Save the date (3 Nov) and follow the program on the UT website 

Digital Assessment offers new opportunities in adapting to the learning process of students. Adaptive Questioning is one of the most new and innovative ways to realise summative assessment, including amongst others feedback mechanisms to identify where the students actually go wrong in their though process when making a test question.

In Januari 2015 a Free Spirits Think Tank has been started  at TU Delft including ambassadors from each faculty, student-members and members of the valorisation centre.

In 2014, the theme of the TU/e CEE innovation fund was feedback. Being aware of what you know and what you don’t know, gives direction to students’ learning. Students therefore benefit from adequate feedback when performing their tasks. Goal of the innovation call was to encourage lecturers to use educationally innovative forms of feedback within their own educational setting to improve the feasibility of the study programs. A total of seven projects within this theme were selected and executed in 2014. The end results of all of the projects are distributed on the 3TU.CEE website innovation map in the next few weeks.

In February 2015, Kristina Edström, Associate professor in Engineering Education at KTH Stockholm and member of the CEE Advisory board, gave a presentation at the CDIO meeting on the effectiveness of teaching: ‘How can we maximize student learning with a reduced level of teaching resources’. In her presentation she gives eight ideas on how we can spend less time on things to improve learning. For example: