TU Delft Education Day 2022 | 10 November

09:50 | A Connected Curriculum: Leading educational change with an integrated teaching framework

Emanuela Tilley is Professor of Engineering Education and Director of the Integrated Engineering Programme at University College London, in London, United Kingdom.

UCL Engineering underwent major educational reform through the design, development and implementation of an integrated teaching framework called the Integrated Engineering Programme (IEP). Often cited as the most comprehensive example of a Connected Curriculum for Higher Education Framework in the United Kingdom, Professor Tilley will present how a connected curriculum goes beyond developing engaging programmes of study and is central to creating spaces for critical dialogue about educational values, approaches and connections, both within and across existing research groups, teaching departments and learning communities.

16:00 | Shaping the future of work – connecting technical and social sciences through transdisciplinarity

David Abbink is Full Professor in Haptic Human-Robot Interaction and member of the Human-Robot Interaction group at the Department of Cognitive Robotics, Faculty 3mE, Delft University of Technology. 
Also, David is Scientific Director AiTech, the interdisciplinary research program on meaningful human control over AI systems; and Scientific Director FRAIM, the transdisciplinary research centre on shaping the future of physical work.

Details of David his keynote will be revealed soon. 

"The Space of Words" – Connecting Students through language

When the new incoming master students join the classrooms of the Department of Architecture, the discrepancies in their background education, work experience and culture are very big. Collaborating productively on projects – a necessary skill in the architectural profession – is considerably hindered. Using language as an architectural tool enables them to overcome their differences and create collectively around a tool and a design method that they are all trying for the first time. Through the example of the course “The Space of Words,” which employs this pedagogical innovation and leads the students to hands-on building, this session discusses how to creatively connect the students in the multicultural and diverse community of TU Delft. In this workshop you will experience how this approach helps students to connect with each other, and we will discuss how this benefits them in their studies and after.

Interdisciplinary curricula: challenges and principles

The very word “Interdisciplinary” has a very positive connotation. It brings together valuable insights from different ways of thinking, making interdisciplinary education programs relevant to society.  However, an effort to build and maintain an interdisciplinary curriculum goes with high transaction costs. What are didactic and governance principles for interdisciplinary programs? Haiko van der Voort is director of the master program Engineering & Policy Analysis. This master resides in The Hague to engage with policymakers out there and build an educational community. In interaction with the audience Haiko will share struggles and victories in making interdisciplinary programs connected, relevant and manageable.

GoGrad makes it easy: The power of co-creation

In the CME MSc program, we noticed that many students faced challenges throughout their graduation process. Challenges make students feel uncomfortable, but these challenges are actually part of the journey: no worries. Others have faced challenges before, so let’s learn from their experiences! 
The open platform “GoGrad” was developed in a co-creation with CME lecturers and students. The platform provides an overview of challenges, clustered in 5 themes: 1) Graduation & You; 2) Graduation & Thesis Committee; 3) Graduation & Company; 4) Graduation & Process; 5) Graduation Topic & Data.
For all challenges, suggestions are given on how to approach these, based on experiences of CME-students and CME-alumni.
In this session we will talk about the set-up of GoGrad and will discuss the challenges and suggested solutions with you. 
 

Next level education innovation 

Innovating engineering education is a multi-actor activity. In this workshop, you will first play a 20 minutes ‘serious game’ where you are going to be part of a development team working on an implementation plan for an intended educational innovation. By taking one of the roles (responsible educator, an educational advisor, an educational researcher, a student assistant, a program leader, a PhD candidate who will teach in the course, and a blended learning coordinator) you will explore how you can take educational innovation as a team to the next level by combining different kinds of expertise. 

Strengthen the connection with your students: Student-question driven teaching 

When lecturing, it is a challenge to know what students understand and where they get stuck. A flipped classroom approach can help improve student connection significantly. By asking students to share questions about the course material before each class lecturers can be composed around student questions. Unexpected questions can lead to increased enjoyment in teaching. In this session, Wim will share how he encourages students to ask questions, and will discuss what might be the underlying reasons why this improved connection is so important in personal teaching.

Entrepreneurial students: How to set up a challenge-based course?

Daan will describe the background, preparation, execution and evaluation of the course Entrepreneurial Engineering. This course that was created for students of the Construction Management and Engineering program and aims to unlock an entrepreneurial attitude in students in an activating way. In this session, you will hear how Daan designed, set up and delivered this course in a challenge based format – and learn how you can apply (aspects of) this to your own education. 

Belonging through agency: Student involvement and community building in university education

Giving individuals a sense of agency in a community has a positive impact on their sense of belonging. We implement this approach in university education by providing students with tools to contribute to course organization and assessment; and observe the effects on their performance. In this session, Ilke reflects on the impact of assignments that give students agency in grading through self-assessment and peer-review processes. She will discuss insights gained from an anonymous feedback system that gives students an opportunity to communicate preferences on course structure and organization throughout the semester. Finally, she will share experiences on the role of student tutorship (assistantship) in building a community in the academic ecosystem. In this interactive session, you will be provided with ideas and observations and exchange thoughts.

We are not robots: on recognizing the human side of academics in a university of technology

As academics in a University of Technology we tend to get a tunnel vision focusing on developing technology as the solution for the problems we encounter. We also have the tendency to identify with the technological solutions we work on. In this session we will explore different levels at which adopting a more humanistic approach could benefit us, from increasing our connection with those around us in our day-to-day work to boosting our impact on society.

Making messages memorable: Creating lectures that students will remember

Academic learning goals often involve students to retain key information. Ideally, lecturers craft their rhetorical communication accordingly. However, proper advice on how to make a message memorable is highly diverse and the effect of rhetorical strategies on audience memory has only been studied scarcely. In his thesis, Martijn Wackers therefore brought together insights from cognitive psychology and rhetorical theory to investigate how rhetorical techniques can influence information retention. Martijn will discuss how the rhetorical situation can affect the way in which students encode and store information. In this workshop, these insights will help you create memorable messages in your own education situation. As a participant, you are encouraged to select an example from your own teaching experience – such as a (video) lecture or a workshop – and consider how you can actively impact students’ information retention.

Engineering role-play: reflect on your engineering processes and imagine your future self

Role-play in engineering can help our students - future engineers - understand who they are and find out their own purpose and path. An exemplary role-play has been embedded within the course: Fundamentals of Biomedical Engineering. In this interactive session, you will hear about ‘engineering role play’ and its practice in the course and experience it yourselves. Following a short introduction, you will pick an engineering role and work on a challenging problem (quite a general one, everyone - with no specific engineering background- can work on it) to come up with a solution from the perspective of your engineering role.

Connecting around a Campfire; Experience this ludodidactic tool that helps students create a better graduation process.

Remember feeling connected around a campfire? The Campfire Talk Intervision Game creates an inviting and safe atmosphere in which students share the difficult issues and emotions they experience during their graduation by themselves. With use of serious gaming methods, students explore encountered issues, look at it from multiple perspectives, search for underlying patterns and formulate steps to deal with them. This creates relief and empowers them. Besides that, they practise conversation skills and empathy. This Campfire Talk is the result of a Comenius Teaching Fellowship. Join the workshop of the Reflective Engineer team to experience this tool and the power of reflection for yourself. Get a feel for who could benefit from this tool in your Context and explore where this might be implemented.

"I wish I learnt this on the first day of my studies!" – 10 principles for designer resilience

The designers, engineers and more broadly pioneers of change we educate today will be at the pinnacle of their careers in 2040 and 2050. These students will go on to effect massive socio-technical transitions required in lieu of issues such climate change. Yet realising change, especially changes to socio-technical systems, brings our students into conflict with the status quo where they encounter powerful structural and political resistance. It takes resilience to negotiate these conflicts within design and engineering projects. And yet, how students can practice resilience remains a blind spot in our education programmes. This session presents the midterm progress of the Senior Comenius Fellowship Project, “Forging Resilient Designers”. The session is interactive and shows results from educational research conducted at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.