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Ruth Graham visits University of Twente

Saturday, 15 December 2018

Ruth Graham @ University of Twente

Ruth Graham visited the University of Twente on 28 November for a workshop on rewarding teaching excellence and a keynote lecture on the future of engineering education. The presentations are included in this article.

Rewarding Teaching Excellence: Next steps

In the morning a workshop was conducted with 60 participants from the University of Twente. After an introduction by Mirjam Bult (CvB), Ruth Graham gave a presentation on the ‘Next steps’ for Rewarding Teaching Excellence, outlining success and fail factors for the implementation phase. Next, Joost Sluijs (director HR) presented the new UT criteria for rewarding teaching excellence in career paths up to a professorship. 

The framework of Graham and these criteria will help to discuss and appreciate teaching achievements. Based upon practical experiences the criteria and their application will be fine-tuned and improved.

After the presentations the audience made suggestions for next steps on the following themes:

  1. Job recruitment and job interviews
  2. Tenure track criteria
  3. Annual appraisal (jaargesprek)
  4. Career steps and career step committees/BACs
  5. Professional development and communities

You can download  the powerpoint slides of Joost Sluijs (including the suggestions) and those of Ruth Graham.

Keynote lecture: The future of engineering education

Ruth Graham also gave a public keynote lecture as part of “The week of inspiration”. She addressed how rapid changes in technology trigger new jobs and updated engineering study programmes in many countries. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked Ruth Graham to survey the global state of the art in engineering education as input for their own MIT educational reform plan NEET. Results were published in Spring 2018 and were presented together with the challenges that come with high quality programmes, such as how to combine challenge based project education with rigorous attention for engineering fundamentals.
In the discussion these trends were compared to the Twente Education Model.

You can find the full discussion and the entire lecture here:

https://vimeo.com/303683790

About Ruth Graham

Dr. Ruth Graham has a background in mechanical engineering. After working in the aerospace industry she directed the redesign of all undergraduate engineering programmes at Imperial College (UK). Since 2008 she is an independent higher education consultant. Besides supporting many universities in improving teaching and learning, Ruth Graham is also leading the Royal Academy of Engineering project in which an international consortium of universities strive for improved support and reward for teaching excellence.