Sem01 (2025-2026) Rebuilding Education

Course details

• Practical information

  Academic year
  2025-2026

  Semester
  1

  Period
  2

  Day(s)
  Monday and Wednesday

  Time
  18:00 – 20:30

  Number of meetings
  14

  Dates of all meetings
  27, 29 October
  3, 5, 10, 12, 17, 19, 24, 26 November
  1, 3, 8, 10 December

  Location
  Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam

  Room
  To be announced

  Credits
  6

  Lecturers

  Course coordinators and workshop lecturers

  • Dr. Jorim Tielbeek, Neuroscientist, VU
    E:  j.j.tielbeek@vu.nl Mob: 0618222053
  • Bertram Loth: Educational scientist, Co-founder Hack Je Les
    E: bertram@hackjeles.nl Mob: 0648578056
  • A multidisciplinary panel of guest lecturers with expertise in course design and educational innovation

• Learning objectives

  1. Explore how a broad range of unconventional academic perspectives and theories can be useful in the process of designing education.
  2. Learn to involve relevant stakeholders and create a theory of action where you increase the likelihood that the course will actually be realized and taught
  3. Familiarize yourself and experiment with more active learning strategies, such as: design thinking, team-based learning and think-pair-share (TPS).
  4. Develop the capacity to perform an in-depth analysis of major situational factors, in order to define the situational constraints and opportunities of a new course.
  5. Establish significant learning goals, focused on several kinds of significant learning, not just “understand-and-remember” kinds of learning.
  6. Learn how to incorporate learning activities that engage students in active learning by incorporating powerful forms of experiential and reflective learning, as well as ways of getting basic information and ideas.
  7. Build knowledge of and insight into educative feedback and assessment including forward-looking assessment, self-assessment, clear criteria and standards, and “FIDeLity” feedback

• Working formats & structure

  The course consists of six expert sessions and eight workshops. Content knowledge is gained at home and mastered during the expert sessions. During the workshops, the majority of instructional time involves all students through active learning, enabling them to directly and collaboratively apply the knowledge to realize the students personal action-oriented goals. The course will be completed with a final symposium.

  At the end of the course students will present their designed courses to a jury of stakeholders and educational experts. Finally, all courses  will be bundled in a website to spread the initiatives beyond the network of Rebuilding Education.

  Expert seminars
  Expert sessions are guided by a multidisciplinary panel of guest lecturers presenting cutting-edge research, and practitioners and teachers demonstrating their innovation in education through engagement with various new learning techniques, tools and resources. The purpose of the six guest lectures is to introduce the students to different perspectives on education and to inspire them how these perspectives can help to build their own education. The students can utilize different perspectives to scientifically support their designed courses.

  Workshop seminars
  The workshops will deploy a wide range of teaching and learning methods (i.e. design thinking, question formulation technique) introduced during the expert seminars to engage participants in individual as well as collaborative problem-solving and reflection on the concerning educational themes. Within the workshops, the course coordinators will act as facilitators by assisting the students and stimulating peer-to-peer feedback to understand problems in a hands-on way, and by coaching them in attaining their personal and group-based goals. In this way students can ultimately benefit from their different academic backgrounds.

• Assessment methods

  Your work will be assessed and graded in two steps:

  1. Presentation of the designed course at symposium (50%, graded by coordinators)
  2. Self-grading (50%) of the newly designed course and your personal learning goals

• Study materials

  All study materials will be uploaded online.

• A selection of book chapters

  All study materials will be uploaded online.

  A selection of book chapters

  These books are recommended, but not required:

  • A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning, L. Dee Fink, PhD
  • Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning, Ken Bain, 2021.
  • Knud Illeris, How we learn: Learning and non-learning in school and beyond (Londen: Routledge, 2007)
  • Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (Hoboken: John Wiley And Sons Ltd, 2017)
  • Ken Robinson & Lou Aronica, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (New York: Penguin Books, 2015).

  TED talks and video material

  • Do Schools Kill Creativity?, How to escape education's death valley & Changing educational paradigms by Sir Ken Robinson
  • Teaching the World Peace Game by John Hunter
  • The 100,000-student Classroom by Peter Norving

  Literature selected by the guest lecturers:

  Will be announced.