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.
Multi-Disciplinary Course Assessment with Multiple Assessors
Many programs in higher education design multi-disciplinary courses, in which students have to apply theories and concepts from different academic disciplines. Although multi-disciplinary courses are desirable, safeguarding their educational and assessment quality is difficult. Many staff members are specialist in one discipline and lack expertise to grade the students’ multi-disciplinary work. This may impair the reliability and validity of the assessment, which may lead to unsound grading decisions.
The goal of this project is to investigate the requirements and design of multi-disciplinary assessment within the current multi-disciplinary course “IE Quick Scan”, within the program of the bachelor Industrial Engineering.
Urbanism Education in a Rapidly Changing World
This is the title of Marco Lub's PhD research exploring the future of education. More precise, the research explores how urbanism education at the faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology has to be developed and carried out in the future. More general, the research looks for recommendations for engineering and design education at the universities of technology.
Compared to accepted and conventional education, three main entities are changing rapidly. First, our main concern, the people, the students and teachers are using different (collaboration) methods, social skills and means of communication. Second, the profession of urbanism is changing its course: from top down planning towards participation and initiative-based cooperation where data processing and sustainability issues are high on the agenda. And last, to give students a good position in the rapidly changing society, learning methods must or will change too.
Lub expects to finish the research in 2019 and he will publish intermediate results on the 3TU.CEE website.
Pilot on Digital testing
A special pilot at the University of Twente with Applied Mathematics will investigate to what extent digital testing is possible without losing quality. Software can of course handle multiple choice answers, however also mathematical expressions can be evaluated and compared with expected answers. A careful pilot will check different quality concerns. We are looking forward to the outcomes as results may lighten the burden of teachers now correcting large numbers of student answers.