Dorina Gnaur

How A Flipped Learning Environment Affects Learning In A Course On Theoretical Computer Science

This paper reports initial experiences with flipping the classroom in an undergraduate computer science course as part of an overall attempt to enhance the pedagogical support for student learning. Our findings indicate that, just as the flipped classroom implies, a shift of focus in the learning context influences the way students engage with the course and their learning strategies.

Engineering Education in Higher Education in Europe

The present chapter concerns engineering education in higher education in a European context. It comprises two main strands: in the first, we present an overview of engineering education in Europe from historical and sociological perspectives, and in the second, we present country-specific examples of engineering education from three European countries—Denmark, Turkey, and the UK, representing three different traditions of engineering education. This chapter contributes to research on the cultural dimension of engineering education, while it may also inform stakeholders on the history, politics, and diverse practices in the European context. We provide a short comparison of the engineering education systems in Denmark, Turkey, and the UK across several criteria. We conclude these different European countries’ innovation levels may stem from their differences in their educational programs and teaching methods: diverse and interdisciplinary in Denmark and the UK and uniform and traditional in Turkey. Finally, we provide recommendations for policy makers, educators, and researchers based on our review.

A Platform for Developing and Maintaining Competences in PBL Supervision

One of the emerging challenges in academia is that of developing and maintaining teaching qualifications in a setting where teaching staff is often temporary and with diverse backgrounds. At Aalborg University, project-organized problem-based learning is at the heart of all degree programmes and supervision within this format has particular challenges. We propose a crowdsourcing approach to developing teaching competence within this format. PBL Exchange is a question/answer-based platform that is currently being rolled out to help teaching staff share and discuss their experiences as project supervisors.

A New Platform for Question-Based Sharing of Supervision Competencies in Problem-Based Learning

PBL Exchange is a new web-based, open source platform implemented in Python using the Django framework for sharing competencies among teaching staff at Aalborg University concerning the supervision of problem-based learning (PBL) projects. PBL Exchange uses a crowdsourcing strategy where users ask questions about PBL and answer questions posed by other users. We describe the structure of PBL Exchange and analyze the challenges of building an active user community for the system. A particular challenge has been that of dealing with the highly heterogeneous teaching environments that exist across departments and faculties.

Designing Learning for Co-Creation

In this chapter, we explore the practical implications of the concept of co-creation in a professional context from an educational point of view. The question we are posing ourselves is: how can higher and further education (HE) educate for co-creation, that is, provide educational frameworks that respond to the societal demand for co-creation, particularly within the public welfare sector? More specifically, we focus on which organisational and individual requirements a HE learning design should take into account in order to support the diffusion of co-creation competences within the public welfare sector.