Best practices Teaching & Learning Innovation

Keywords: Open Eduational Resources; Textbook; Digital Data; Data Management

Brief description

The core part of the new learning activity is the contribution of students to an online textbook, a so called OER (Open Education Resource). This OER will guide students through the materials and exercises to complete the learning track covering this course and two other courses in the Cultural Analytics learning track. Topics in the textbook are:

• Coding for Humanities

• Collecting data

• Analyzing data 

About the course

This is a project-based course in which students complete 3 individual assignments aimed at learning various skills related to the collection of digital data from the web, open science practices, and data management according to the FAIR principles. The final individual assessment consists in the resubmission of one substantially improved version of one of these three assignments, taking into account the feedback previously received. In this way it’s possible to evaluate if students have learned from their mistakes and became better at applying the acquired knowledge.

In parallel, students are required to prepare a final group project for which they have to formulate a research question, find data to answer the RQ, do an exploratory data analysis, and create visualizations to present the data and their exploration of it.

The instructions for the group project ask students to not only perform the required tasks but also to report on the work done in the form of a tutorial that can be used by next year’s Digital Humanities students. Students are told that if a project is of high enough quality it can be included in the OER used to teach the course in the following year. Indeed, one group’s project has been integrated into the OER

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Keywords: Peer feedback; FeedbackFruits; Peerceptive; Professionals in the class; self-reflection; essay;

Brief description

In the MA module Music, Theatre, Sound, Pieter Verstraete used FeedbackFruits and gave the students the opportunity to interview and speak to professionals other than the lecturer. By doing so, the students can steer their own learning processes and career paths driven by their own questions. Peerceptive was a good tool for students to read their own essay abstracts and comment on them, as long as the lecturer also monitors the process closely. In this way, students learn from each other while reading different feedbacks. It also allows them to finetune their ideas and ways of formulating the argument, before they submit it officially. In the end, they can monitor their own progress through a concept version of their essays and the results they get along the way. They can also self-reflect on their writing process in response to the feedback, so it helps them to realistically estimate which efforts are needed to improve their essays. It makes, hopefully, writing essays more interactive and stimulating rather than a source for frustration and anxiety.

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Keywords: Visualization; Group work;

Brief description

In the BA module Introduction to Audiovisual Arts, Pieter Verstraete used a visualization assignment in the seminars, which helped students through group work to discern and formulate the formal structure of the argument in one text they had to prepare for the lecture each week. Upon repetition, they came up with creative visualizations which opened the discussion of the contents of the text without making it a formal presentation. By recognizing the argumentative structure in texts by other academics, students could also improve their own ways of formulating arguments in a proper, academic way. By giving students gradual control over the contents and discussions of the seminars, they learn to help develop each other, as well, and that they need to inform the teacher what they need - not expect that the teacher does everything. Important is that you still give written feedback on the creative solutions that students come up with beyond the immediate feedback students get form each other in the seminar room. Brightspace enables the seminar instructors to give those final comments.

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Keywords: PollEverywhere; éngagement;

Brief description

IPE of Trade is a large, lectures-only course with about 200 students. Polleverywhere is one of several tools that I am trying out in order to make the lectures more interactive. 

To use Poll Everywhere in class, the polls have to be prepared beforehand. The University of Groningen currently has an institutional subscription and UG users can easily login at https://www.polleverywhere.com/ with their university login credentials (no need to create a new account). With the software one can create a variety of polls (e.g. multiple choice, word cloud, open-answer, etc.), which students can complete during the lectures, with the results being displayed in real-time on the screen. 

I used it in two ways:

1. To tease students’ interest and increase attention levels, I asked the audience a few multiple choice questions at the start of lectures about (perhaps surprising) facts and puzzles that were going to be “resolved” in the subsequent lecture.
2. To generate some more interaction in large-group lectures, I also designed a few short activities that they were asked to work on in pairs. Students were asked to discuss certain questions with their neighbor for a few minutes and then express their answer or point of view via the app.

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