Teaching & Learning Fellows: Enriching the educational landscape with Challenge Based Learning at the UT.

Project introduction and background information

The Centre for Engineering Education (CEE) has started a pilot with Teaching & Learning Fellows in 2021. The pilot consists of 5 Faculty fellows and 2 senior fellows (7 persons in total).  The fellows will work together on a specific theme for the upcoming 2 years.  The theme of the first cohort of the fellows is Challenge Based Learning (CBL).

Overall goal of fellows plan: To enrich the current educational landscape at the UT with CBL to help students develop critical, social and practical knowledge and competences necessary for their future careers in society.

To complement the educational landscape with CBL at the UT, it is crucial that strategic ideas and policies on CBL are embedded more firmly in the daily practice of teaching and learning. This explorative and creative process is considered the key task for the newly appointed T&L Fellows. In other words, the Fellows aim to bridge the gap between the UT’s strategic vision on CBL and the operational level.

Objective and expected outcomes

The individual Fellows address different goals and outcomes. Some Fellows concentrate on developing and sharing knowledge on CBL from their own courses, whereas others concentrate on the dissemination of CBL at the program and/or Faculty level. Below we indicate how individual goals relate to team goals and outcomes outlined earlier:

Robin de Graaf:
Study effectiveness of CBL at course level; develop an implementation guideline for CBL; implement CBL at program level; help develop CBL policy at Faculty level; Fellows team project management.

Raymond Loohuis
Support the transition process from course to UT level; communicate, align with stakeholders in UT context

Anna Bos-Nehles
Design of self-regulated peer-feedback mechanisms for CBL projects. In what way can we implement peer feedback approaches in CBL projects to gain self regulated learning behaviours?

Tracy Craig
Pilot an existing course to CBL framework; communicate within faculty on CBL; identify existing CBL within faculty, possibly not explicitly called CBL at the moment

Janneke Ettema
To enhance students’ learning process, by providing tools for (self-)assessment in line with the course learning outcomes and CBL skills; to help students establish a shared interdisciplinary and intercultural language, building self-awareness and learning to have productive conversations with other experts (alumni network)

Anne Leferink
Investigate the role of the teacher in CBL; guiding tools on expectation management in the learning community; methods to realize pre-defined content based (hard skills) learning objectives in a CBL context.

Léon Olde Scholtenhuis
Develop principles for operating a transdisciplinary Living Lab space that enables sustainable and authentic learning experiences for students and stakeholders.