On March 5th 25 teachers from 12 universities of the ECIU University network joined the kick-off meeting for building a community of practice. All of the participants are involved in challenges and challenge-based learning (CBL) in spring and summer term 2021 and had an opportunity to get to know their colleagues from all over Europe.
After an introduction from Dorothea Ellinger (Hamburg University of Technology), Rúben Alves (University of Aveiro) opened the one hour meeting by giving a short overview of an Erasmus+ project ColLab. The project is designed by five universities of the ECIU network to become an online platform that should be useable after summer this year. It is going to be the virtual space for teachers to exchange their material, experience, and workshops about innovative teaching like CBL in practice, as well as being the platform to exchange findings based on research concerning innovative teaching methods.
In break-out sessions’ teachers had 20 minutes to introduce themselves and their CBL projects. They noticed how much they had in common and offered each other help and further exchange concerning questions like: How can I motivate teams of students? How do I find enough students from other universities to join my challenge? How can we collaborate? How can we exchange our material? Everyone agreed that ColLab and regular exchange is very much needed.
Colleagues from University of Twente, University of Stavanger and Hamburg University of Technology responsible for the “task force assessment” (TFA) shared a handout for teachers in extracurricular CBL settings with questions: How can I foster the learning process together with my students? What can I use for group and individual reflection? These handouts include examples for reflection tools and an assessment tool called single point rubric teacher are asked to use in their CBL projects. The colleagues hope that TFA is getting a lot of feedback, as it will now focus on curricular CBL approaches and how to embed a kind of grading into CBL.
From now on the “Round Table CBL” is a monthly meeting to bring teachers together to talk about their CBL implementations. It enables the exchange of experiences between practitioners and helps to answer general questions about CBL. Teachers from the whole ECIU University network are invited to join the next meeting on the 9th of April, 2 - 3 pm CEST, via a Zoom link you find here: https://www2.tuhh.de/zll/challenged-based-learning/#support