This course will prepare you for teaching science in higher education. In this MOOC you will learn to make your knowledge as an excellent researcher accessible to your students. We will show you how to communicate science to novices as well as advanced students in science. You will experience the value of teaching with analogies and you will be guided to train your students' competences. Based on up-to-date findings from research into teaching and learning science you will be able to
- implement evidence-based strategies into your own teaching,
- use students everyday-conceptions for the development of courses,
- prepare analogies and models to teach in your field,
- implement problem-based teaching,
- set up for experiments and teach the nature of science.
This course enables you to teach abstract science topics to your students and make them become active and successful learners. The course is based on lectures (videos), handouts (knowledge-to practise briefs), which supplement the knowledge taught in the lectures and assignments to implement the teaching strategies into your own practise.
From the lesson
(Re-)Frame your science teaching
Welcome to the fourth week of Teaching Science at University! In this week we want to show you how we can frame our science teaching to increase interest, motivation, and understanding of the students. In the first lesson we ask how the framing of science teaching can help students see the relevance of science for society. We look at problems from everyday life and their potential to foster students understanding of science. Activating our students is one key to reducing failure rates in our classrooms. We look how to design a new course by setting the goals our students have to achieve and how to foster learning when supervising a thesis. Finally we look how to communicate risk and uncertainty in an appropriate way to foster understanding. At the end of this week you should be able to frame your science teaching to make it relevant for your students.