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Build your own honours course

Sem02 (2023-2024) Rebuilding Education*

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“At its roots partnership is about investing students with the power to co-create, not just knowledge or learning, but the higher education institution itself.” (National Union of Student’s (NUS) Manifesto for partnership, 2012, p. 8). We believe that students are crucial in building their own education. Therefore, the central question of the course Rebuilding Education is: how do I design a great course?

What are some of the most fascinating topics that should be part of the Honours Programme? Why do some courses linger in memory long after graduation, while others fade quickly despite the instructor's best efforts?

In this course, we'll delve into the intricate connections between neuroscience, cognitive development, economic and social change, management, technology, and education. We'll dissect the characteristics that define impactful courses. Most importantly, you'll collaborate with fellow innovators to craft new courses for the Honours Programme, providing a unique opportunity to shape your own educational experience!

Drawing inspiration from the success of past editions where students created courses like Law and Love, Planetary Health, and Climate Justice—now integral to the VU Honours Programme—our mission this year is to guide you in developing more meaningful and impactful courses.

This course will introduce ground-breaking new perspectives taught by leading scholars, practitioners and thinkers in the field of compelling and transformative education. Throughout the course students learn how such research and innovation can be applied in the creation of powerful courses. To achieve this, we will use the Self-Directed Guide by Dee Fink on Designing Courses for Significant Learning and the book ‘Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning’ by Ken Bain. By collaborating closely with potential coordinators and teachers, you'll gain practical insights into the creation of courses that leave a lasting impact.

This is an honours course

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Course details

  • Practical information

    Academic year
    2023-2024

    Semester
    2

    Period
    4

    Day(s)
    Monday and Wednesday

    Time
    18:00 – 20:30

    Number of meetings
    12

    Dates of all meetings
    12, 14, 19, 21, 26, 28 February
    4, 6, 11, 13, 18, 20 March

    Location
    Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam

    Room
    Mondays: BV-0H36
    Wednesdays: NU-6A52

    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
    6. Significant learning, not just “understand-and-remember” kinds of learning.
    7. 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.
    8. 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 goal of the course is that the students will design new courses for the VU Honours Programme. They can choose between a case where there is already a motivated teacher that needs help in the creation of their course or 2) pick a critical topic of a new course and find a motivated teacher. 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.

    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.

    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 three steps:

    1. Presentation of the designed course at symposium (30%, graded by coordinators)

    2. Handing in the final new Course

    3. Self-grading (70%) 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.