News

“We like to actively engage the TU Delft community and are ready to support teachers who would like to innovate and/or research their education. We welcome interaction on project ideas and invite you to participate in inspiring events to exchange ideas and upgrade your skills and knowledge on topics such as interdisciplinarity, entrepreneurial learning, innovative learning spaces. And last, but not least we will work closely with our 4TU.CEE colleagues in Wageningen, Eindhoven and Enschede to jointly innovate engineering education for tomorrow’s engineer. Our (e-mail) doors are wide open.”

In the 4TU.CEE board, some personnel changes have occurred.

A comment of Renate Klaassen of 4TU.CEE Delft on ‘Disentangling the different layers of interdisciplinarity’ was included in a special issue of the Journal of Science Communication.

The University of Twente has done a successful pilot with new and more extended didactical training for Learning Assistants (LAs): students who are formally involved in other students’ learning processes. Student-assistants have sufficient content expertise but many can improve on didactical skills according to UT students. They requested to spend part of the ‘Kwaliteitsgelden’ on more extended training, which was assigned to them. The new LA trajectory (28 hours, 1 EC) is spread over two quartiles. It focuses on didactical principles and didactical reasoning and prepares LAs for their current tasks as well as for other LA tasks they might get in the future. ’During the pilot we noticed that students really learn to look at education differently, from the perspective of the teacher. That is exactly the effect we wanted to achieve’, says Ineke ten Dam of 4TU.CEE who, together with Marieke van Geel, is responsible for the pilot. The first three LA’s received their certificate from the rector last week.

SEFI2020 was planned to take place at the location of University of Twente campus (20-24 September), but will now be an exciting online event. In the new format there will be lots of inspiring keynotes, orals, posters, workshops and options to meet online. Sufficient technology support will be arranged to make this a good and interactive experience for all. Click here for the draft programme. Conference fees are reduced. You are welcome to register now!

Computer-aided technologies are omnipresent in many engineering disciplines. Be it the computer-aided design of a ship hull, the simulation-based analysis of the bending of an airplane wing, or the computer-driven optimization of the shape of a Formula One car, it is the aid of computational tools that helps engineers through their daily professional life. These tools are often available as ready-to-use software packages whose usage is taught to engineering students in the classroom. However, compute technologies change over time and so do the computational tools and the underlying mathematical algorithms. Today’s tools are often based on algorithms that have been initiated decades ago. It often takes years to mature novel algorithms from academic concepts to production-ready tools. It is therefore natural to take a look into the future of computing and start developing novel algorithms for next-generation computer-aided engineering tools today.

The corona situation has forced an abrupt transition to online education in many institutions. Postdoc Tim Stevens is investigating and evaluating the process and outcomes of this abrupt transition at WUR. His research aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the transition to online education and map factors that shape the adoption of online tools and methods at WUR. Preliminary results show that teachers were not happy with ‘being forced’ to fully teach online. However they were able to teach the course to their own satisfaction.

A 4TU.CEE review study on interdisciplinary engineering education was published in the Journal of Engineering Education. 

The 4TU.Centre for Engineering Education (4TU.CEE) will get involved in a large-scale NWO research project. It involves 25 higher education institutes that will investigate what and how teachers learn when they innovate their own courses. The research is funded by the NRO (Nederlands Regieorgaan Onderwijsonderzoek), a sub department from NWO especially focused on research on education. 4TU.CEE is strongly involved in the research project, with professor Jan Vermunt (TU/e) and professor Perry den Brok (WUR) as project leader and assisting project leader, respectively, and with research to be conducted at various of the 4TU institutes.

Aldert Kamp, 4TU.CEE leader at TU Delft has released his new book ‘Navigating the landscape of Higher Engineering Education’ with lots of new insights for future-fit higher engineering education.

Professor Isabelle Reymen, scientific director of TU/e innovation Space, has secured a grant worth half a million euros under the Comenius programme run by NWO. Reymen will develop the conceptual framework for Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) and will research its subsequent rollout and upscaling at TU/e.

This year the CDIO Conference was hosted on-line due to COVID-19. Chalmers University of Technology had done a good job in quickly transferring the conference into an online one. The recordings of the sessions can be found on the website of Chalmers University. The introductory speech of Aldert Kamp, 4TU.CEE leader of TU Delft, ‘Never waste a good crisis’ is online too.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced an abrupt transition to online education. Researcher Tim Stevens is studying the transition to online education at Wageningen University. What can we learn from the transition to online education? The first results are available now.

Challenge-based learning is becoming an important learning and teaching strategy at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, 2018). During challenge-based learning, students work in multi-disciplinary groups on open-ended and real-life challenges that are provided by stakeholders in the field of engineering (Membrillo-Hernández et al., 2019; Rosén et al., 2018). Teachers are expected to work as coaches, who support and guide the learning process of the students. Both ‘traditional’ teacher-based instruction (e.g. in lectures) and challenge-based learning (and coaching) are currently practiced at Eindhoven University of Technology.

A total of 21 international universities have taken part in the Teaching Cultures Survey by Ruth Graham supported by 4TU.CEE and international partners. The Teaching Cultures Survey report shows the overall conclusions based on 15.659 participating academics: (1) university teaching is undervalued, (2) education is not a priority topic in annual appraisals, and (3) support for change as two thirds would like university teaching to be very important, with high scores for the category of university leaders. Apart from the international coalition, all Dutch universities, VSNU, KNAW and NWO agreed to diversify career paths including new ways to give more weight to teaching in academic careers. Future runs of the survey will measure if culture and practise have changed.