Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has embraced Active Learning as a foundational part of its Educational vision. By encouraging students to engage with each other, course content, and teachers, they develop competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) needed to be able to make meaningful contribution to solving society’s problems. Research on active learning and student engagement indeed back up the belief that these educational concepts stimulate student development.
The implementation of active learning is, however, not always easy. It means balancing university expectations, your own teaching beliefs, and student needs, in a specific context. This means that active learning requires context-sensitivity and reflectivity, in order to create a supportive learning environment in which students want to engage in active learning methods.
This short course is here to help. Together, we will explore what student engagement in active learning really means, what expert teachers do, and how teachers can develop relevant skills.
Your trainer
Jan Willem Grijpma started his career as a university teacher. Since 2015, he works as a teacher trainer at VU-CTL and has recently completed his PhD on student engagement in small-group active learning settings. During the course, we’ll dive into the insights from his work and those of other educational scholars to explore how they can be transferred to the teaching practices of participants of the course.
For whom?
This course is for teachers who want to improve the engagement of their students. Although the focus of this course is on small-group active learning settings, those who teach larger groups of students are also welcome.
This course is only open to participants with an employment status at VU Amsterdam or UMC.
More about this course
Contents and results
Dates, costs and contact
