Stories of Five TU Delft Education Teams

#4 The story of the CSE Teaching Team

Evolution of the team

Initially, the CSE teaching team was created to accommodate the steep growth each year in student numbers of the BSc Computer Science Engineering. The programme attracted so many students – in one particular year, a total of 864 students enrolled! – that it was necessary to introduce a matching and selection procedure, limiting the maximum number of students to 550. By assigning members from the team as co-teachers to BSc courses, it was possible to accommodate these high student numbers, whilst at the same time delivering the high-quality education that these students enrolled at TU Delft for. This is how the CSE Teaching Team started.

Although the teaching team was initially created to deal with increased student numbers, it also offered a unique opportunity to improve the quality of education of the BSc programme as a whole. To appreciate this point, we need to understand the before and after of when the teaching team became embedded within the education of the BSc programme. In the past, courses would be taught by just one teacher. Very often, this would be someone with a strong research profile, who would focus mostly on the technical content of the course. Since the introduction of the teaching team, courses are now co-taught together with a research-oriented and a teaching-oriented colleague.

As Taico explains, “There are many brilliant ideas out there on how to improve education. In practice, however, people do not have the time and energy, in addition to their research and teaching activities to actually apply these ideas to their own courses. By organizing our courses the way we do now, we combine the best of both worlds. In addition to the expertise on the technical content of the course, one of the teachers, namely a member from the teaching team, specifically looks at how best to design the course given this material.”

Perhaps the most difficult challenge the team encountered during their journey, was how to get others as enthusiastic about the idea of co-teaching a course, as they were. In fact, it took quite some time before the teaching team managed to firmly take root within their own department/ faculty. The main reason for this was that not everyone saw the need for this change. Something to which Christoph could relate very well. “In the past, my work used to be much more research oriented. Teaching a course from this perspective, what matters is the content. The idea of co-teaching your course creates a lot of resistance. I mean, it’s your course and you’re an expert on the topic. You know how to teach, that’s what you’ve been doing for years, so you don’t need any help. I think what changed people’s minds over time is really just how much better a course becomes by joining forces this way. Slowly but surely, people were starting to see that the point was not that they hadn’t been doing a good job at teaching before. But that it was much more about acknowledging the different demands of education and putting everyone’s talents to good use.”

Success factors

The main reason that the team was so successful was definitely the good atmosphere in the team. The team was formed bottom-up and the people who became a member all shared a passion for education and … an attitude that is distinctive for computer scientists. Or so Taico light-heartedly remarks: “As computer scientists, whenever we look at something, we say: “Yes, this is good. But how can we make this better.” Combine this with an open-door policy and the fact that most team members are on campus three to four days a week, then you have pretty much everything you need for a successful, enthusiastic teaching team. Talking about his own experiences from the team, Ivo remarks that “looking back, it is really satisfying to see that we virtually never teach the same course twice. Every time, we make some changes, maybe to the materials we teach, or to the way we teach or assess students. This makes it really fun for us, and we can tell that students really appreciate this.”

What is also distinctive of the team is that they not only put to good use the talents of academic and teaching staff, but also the talents of their students! An important skill that CSE BSc students have to master is developing software that tailors to the needs of users. The team often invites students to come up with solutions as part of their assignments to real-life requests the team receives. Think for instance of such things as developing software that enables computer-based exams for programming assignments, or software that facilitates tracking project progress and grading by a large number of different project committees. “Students come up with brilliant solutions whilst at the same time practicing skills that are essential to computer science. I really enjoy working together with students in this way”, Taico says.

Known for their willingness and enthusiasm to extend their expertise beyond the borders of their own faculty, the teaching team, together with students, have already helped many others at TU Delft deal with educational challenges.

Lessons Learned for TU Delft

When asked what tips they had for others who would be interested in doing something similar Christoph kept it short and simple: “Be bold. Don’t worry about making mistakes, or whether or not your initiative will be a success in the end. Just try it and allow yourself to see what will happen”.

[1] Want to know more about ART? Read the story of ART here.

[2] Want to know more about MUDE? Read the story of MUDE here. 

[3] Want to know more about PUCH MOOC? Read the story of PUCH MOOC here. 

[4] The article referred to here is “The Strength of TU Delft Education Teams”. Interested in the article? You can find it here.