IT course examination:

Background:

My teaching portfolio, consists today of a combination of courses mainly at the under-graduate and post-graduate level, where I’m either a teacher or a course organizer. Here I would like to specifically discuss a course for PhD students that I have been organizing since 2007. This course is structured as a research seminar series including a total of 15 lectures (1 lecture/week) in the filed of pathogen/host interactions covering a broad range of disciplines including virology, bacteriology, parasitology and immunology. The course also includes an examination that I have previously organized in the form of a project work followed by an oral presentation.

The pedagogical problem:

One major aim in the course is to encourage the students to critically think and discuss experimental approaches presented during the scientific seminars and also to reflect around how to apply such methods in their individual research projects.  Despite clear instructions to both speakers and students and several emails, a recurrent problem is the limited interactions with the teachers (during the seminar) as well as between the students themselves.

Suggestion:

To cope with the above-described issue, I plan to create a wiki named “host/pathogen interactions” in KI-commons. I will first organize the students in groups of 4 and invite them to join the wiki. Each week, a group will be assigned the task to (1) lead a debate (on wiki) around the presented seminar and (2) write a review of the literature in the presented topic. In addition to the course literature (which will be available in ping pong), the students will also be given the possibility to meet with the speaker (at the end of their talk) for an “interview” where they can voice record or film. They could for example use this material to populate the wiki. Though a blogg could also represent a good alternative for task1, the reason why I still prefer a wiki is because it opens the possibility for the group to nicely work together on the summary (task2). At the same time it would be still possible to follow the individual contribution of the students and to follow their work-progression. And why not inviting the “speakers” to join the wiki and present their opinions? Again wiki is the optimal choice, since even non-KI teachers in the course can join to animate debate!

Expected outcomes:

I hope that implementing a “host/pathogen interactions” wiki in my course would act as an “ice-breaker” to foster more interaction and exchange of ideas between the students. This will also give the students more time for reflection and importantly to also learn how to be a team player!

If you are curious, then see you again around June 2011, then I will hopefully be able to tell you about the outcome of this adventure!