Engaging students on societal impact of technology

Our challenge was about how to engage students in thinking about and actually process these implications in a societal context and at the same time fitting that into the limited available time we had for teaching the course and for students to follow the course. I aimed to offer my students a more active learning experience, leading to a high quality learning experience and at the same time more efficiency for me.

In this course we added digital assignments which could be assessed automatically and we recorded guest speakers for future use. We also created and used video recordings of guest speakers; made better use of existing online materials including Quizzes, and we made a stronger and clearer connection between learning goals and learning activities, while adding more variety in learning activities. We made online resources available in an activating way. Before I just offered the resources, but now I connected them to a specific assignment.

For instance, we aim to add role-play to discussions which adds a lot to the learning experience and learning outcomes of students, without leading to more time for me to assess. But you need to watch a video first to be able to participate in the role play discussion. I am sure this helped to better achieve the learning goals we set.

The quizzes worked really well, and we added short lectures which lead to a lot of interaction which students seemed to value highly. I am also quite excited about how we managed to increase engagement among students in the societal discussions. Students need to prepare by self-study in Brightspace and then engage in active discussions about specific topics in a roleplay discussion.

I aimed to offer my students a more active learning experience, leading to a high quality learning experience and at the same time more efficiency for me.

I aimed to offer my students a more active learning experience, leading to a high quality learning experience and at the same time more efficiency for me.

• I would definitely recommend to include students or student assistants, and possibly learning developers in setting up your Brightspace course.

• We had the luxury to be able to design the course in parallel to a first course run, while being able to apply the new setup in a second course run in this academic year. This helped us think about the course and about changes while doing, and we had the luxury to do this in collaboration with a learning developer.

• Our student assistents set up Brightspace differently. Their input, from a student perspective, really helped to increase the quality of the Brightspace environment. Before I did not understand why certain information I added to Brightspace was unclear for students, but the student perspectivce of student assistents helped a lot to make this clearer.