ETH Zurich | Educational Development and Technology (LET)
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Copyright (c) 2025 Pia Scherrer; Florian Rittiner , Benno Volk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Günther Dissertori https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Digital pedagogy for data-driven unsolicited urban design
As urban environments evolve with increasing complexity, urban planning must adapt by often responding to unsolicited demands rather than to commissioned, structured work. This paper explores the integration of digital tools – including Digital Twins – into the architectural curriculum at ETH Zurich, aiming to bridge the gap between data-driven site analysis and data-driven design. The study focuses on the application of these methods in real-world contexts,such as the Urban Transformation Project Sarajevo, where students from ETH Zurich and the University of Sarajevo applied the acquired knowledge to the development of a new Urban Plan for Sarajevo. The impact of the newly introduced digital pedagogies is investigated within existing lectures and through innovative learning environments, such as hackathons for architects. The outcomes highlight the potential of digital literacy in supporting future urban planners. By introducing digital tools through project-based learning, students were enabled to connect data-driven site analysis with data-driven unsolicited design processes, fostering a more holistic understanding of urban planning.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Pagani, Michael Walczak, Hubert Klumpner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Assessing transferable competencies in a real-world course setting with practice partners
Project-based education (PBE) has been increasingly adopted in various educational institutions to better prepare students for the complexities of the ‘real world’. In this article, we present the course ‘Applied Forest and Landscape Management Lab’, highlighting its unique approach to project-based learning in collaboration with practice partners. In this course, students work in groups on a project such as developing a sustainable forest management plan in exchange with the cantonal authorities, local foresters and external experts. This experience enhances their understanding of theoretical concepts and prepares them for the challenges they may face in their future working environment. In the course discussed in this article, student learning is assessed primarily through detailed written reports that are graded using rubrics that we revised to operationalise the ETH Competence Framework. Not all fostered competencies are well reflected in a written report,and we discuss other assessment forms such as oral presentations or peer feedback. While the project process is vital for learning, we concluded that for this course setting, grading only the final report aligns with real-world practices: students produce a comprehensive summary for the cantonal authority, similar to environmental consultants. This approach allows students to focus on creating a well-structured report and fosters an open environment for discussing group dynamics, cooperation, teamwork, and problem-solving with the supervising team, free from the stress of being graded on these aspects.
Copyright (c) 2025 Noëmi Brüggemann, Anouk N'Guyen van Chinh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Influence of distractors on student’s performance and confidence in single choice quizzes
Single choice questions are a substantial part of exams in various fields, in particular in mathematics. However, few studies have examined how the provided incorrect answer options (the so-called ‘distractors’) in mathematical questions are affecting the achievement of the students. In this paper we describe a study designed to investigate not only the effect of distractors on the performance, but also which kind of distractors make students uncertain or, on the contrary, lull students into a false sense of security.
Copyright (c) 2025 Meike Akveld, Seraina Wachter, Jakob Heimer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Exploration labs: A high-quality PBL-format designed to equip students with career-critical competencies for industry
Project-based education is an established approach in engineering education to equip students with the necessary skills to address the highly complex and uncertain challenges they face in industry in a dynamic globalized industrial environment. The belief in the efficacy of project-based learning in conveying these skills has risen among educators, and a framework for designing effective, high-quality project-based learning formats has been proposed by Mergendoller (2018). In this paper, a project-based learning format, the Exploration Lab, is introduced to address the research question: To what extent and through which elements does the EXL enhance career-critical competencies, and how do students compare it to traditional thesis projects? The format focuses on using real industry challenges to teach early-stage agile product development and innovation in an industry setting. The main elements of the format are described and linked to how they contribute to achieving high-quality project-based learning.Adding on this, a link to the ETH Competence Framework is made, elaborating on main competencies like problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, or communication the Exploration Lab aims to convey. Observations on key-learnings of the first cohort, including student self-assessments and industry outcomes, of this format are related to the competence framework, serving as initial validation of efficacy and highlight the Exploration Lab’s alignment with high-quality project-based learning and competence-building goals. In future works, more extensive approaches to measuring the effectiveness of this format could be explored. In particular, indicators of increased competence could be assessed using tools like pre- and post-project-participation surveys.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel Gisler , von Petersdorff-Campen Kai , Mirko Meboldt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A practical guide to integrating project-based learning into a curriculum to foster a competence-based learning environment
Project-based learning is an effective approach for developing subject-specific, method-specific, social, and personal competencies in university students. Development in higher education calls for integrating such courses into existing curricula. This might be challenging due to the lack of experience as well as time and knowledge constraints of the lecturers to design such courses. Yet, also integrating such courses into existing curricula can be challenging due to resource constraints. Therefore, we report on a practical guide for lecturers on how to design and implement a project-based learning environment that fosters subject-specific, method-specific, social and personal competencies. In the course Agro-Food Projects students of agricultural and food sciences at ETH Zurich work in teams to tackle practice-relevant, authentic, and complex challenges provided by a practice partner from the agri-food sector. The course follows a structured schedule with predefined deliverables and deadlines to promote self- and team-directed learning. Key elements for success include clear responsibilities among teaching staff, a well-organized schedule, and comprehensive support for students. Coaches play a crucial role in guiding the project teams while encouraging autonomy, ensuring that students engage actively with their projects. This course setting provides actionable strategies to encourage educators to implement effective project-based learning which fosters an environment where students take ownership of their learning journey.
Copyright (c) 2025 Brigitte Dorn, Achim Walter, Markus Schuppler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Yes, we can: Empowering 21st century skills in a large introductory classroom through project-based learning
Fostering ‘21st Century Skills’ is becoming increasingly important in view of the rapidly changing world, with transferable competencies such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication being crucial to succeed in work and society. Adapting university teaching to these requirements necessitates the development of appropriate curricula, courses, and teaching materials, as well as examinations that can adequately measure these competencies. Various teaching methods are suited to convey transferable competencies, in particular student-centred methods like project-based learning (PBL), where learners work collaboratively on authentic problems. Many studies demonstrated that PBL improves understanding, team performance, motivation, and critical thinking, in contrast to conventional teaching formats where students are exposed to the material more passively with few opportunities to actively apply concepts and question them critically. The flipped classroom model can also contribute to fostering ‘21st Century Skills’ as shifting knowledge transfer to self-study creates space in courses for activities that train social and personal skills through discussions, group work, or PBL. Promoting transferable skills is especially challenging in bachelor programs where courses are usually attended by many students with heterogeneous background knowledge, posing major challenges for lecture design. Thus, traditional, teacher-centred methods are often the format of choice. Here, we describe the development of a flipped classroom with a particular focus on project-based activities training social and personal skills for a large introductory biology lecture. By transferring part of the knowledge acquisition to the self-study phase, in-class sessions became free for project-based group work where students design experiments to study the genetic basis of diseases. At the end of the course, the groups present their projects in a poster session to their peers, the lecturers, and experts. Besides applying the knowledge acquired in the course, the group projects allow students to work on ‘real-world problems’ relevant to their field of study. Tutors (student teaching assistants) support students in their projects by providing feedback, clarifying questions, and evaluating the final project outcomes. The interdisciplinary nature of the project promotes problem-solving skills and critical thinking, while the didactic setting allows students to train their social competencies (cooperation & teamwork). Importantly, the group phase also impacts the skills development of the tutors, as they can expand their skills in the social and personal areas as well. Implementing PBL to promote 21st Century Skills’ in large, heterogenous classes represents several challenges including infrastructural constraints, organizational complexity, and student motivation. This paper describes how a flipped classroom approach can support the development of competencies by PBL and suggests solutions to address challenges associated with this teaching format. Our analysis of student feedback collected over multiple years indicates that the project-based approach is effective in key aspects, such as group productivity, student-tutor interaction, and student motivation, and suggests that for certain student groups, fostering a stronger sense of project relatedness remains an area for future improvement.
Copyright (c) 2025 Katja Köhler, Samuel Tobler, Florin Gegenschatz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Framing project-based education at ETH Zurich
Universities today walk a complex line between delivering education that is more than just professional training, whilst ensuring that graduates are equipped adequately to navigate post- study employment. One approach to this challenge is to focus on competencies as a way to frame and capture learning that goes beyond classic subject-specific knowledge. This paper explores the potential of project-based education (PBE) as a pedagogic approach relevant for institutions interested in fostering transferable competencies, using the example of ETH Zurich. After introducing the history of PBE, this paper proposes a definition of PBE for ETH Zurich. It discusses the operationalisation of the definition, using guiding questions and sharing examples of PBE that already take place at ETH Zurich. Finally, the paper concludes with a set of implications of PBE for ETH Zurich and more broadly for higher education institutions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Emily Elsner, Vera Kaps, Kerrin Weiss, Florian Rittiner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Expanding horizons: The pedagogical benefits of museum visits for engineering students
This paper explores the pedagogical benefits of a museum visit for engineering students. While field trips have proven to be effective tools to improve students' critical thinking, ethical reflection, and cultural awareness, they are still rarely featured in engineering curricula. This paper focuses on a field trip to a museum as part of the course ‘International Engineering: From Hubris to Hope’ at ETH Zürich, where students explored an exhibition addressing colonialism and looted art. We show how this experience bridges the gap between technical knowledge and the complex contexts that engineers must navigate during their career. Combining student questionnaires and reflective reports, we find that students strongly appreciate this type of experiential learning. Moreover, interviews with different stakeholders highlight the importance of field trips in fostering deeper engagement and critical thinking. Overall, our findings suggest that this type of project-based learning can enhance engineering students' preparedness for the ethical and cultural challenges they will encounter in their professional careers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lukas Walker, Elizabeth Tilley, Colin Walder https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Growing critical minds and cultivating solutions: Design Thinking as a useful toolkit and mindset for a project-based learning environment
In the face of contemporary global challenges such as food security, climate change, and socio-economic inequalities, fostering critical and creative thinking skills in higher education is paramount. Besides domain-specific expert knowledge, transferable competencies of graduates have become increasingly important in addressing current challenges by embracing complexity and integrating diverse backgrounds. This study explores the integration of Design Thinking within a project-based learning framework to enhance these competencies among agroecology students. The course ‘Agroecologist Without Borders’, offered at ETH Zurich, serves as a case study. Students engage with stakeholders and specialists, fostering a rich exchange of knowledge that directly impacts their learning outcomes. The course employs a transdisciplinary approach, integrating diverse disciplines and environments, with Design Thinking guiding students through understanding, empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing solutions to real-world challenges. This approach serves as a model for future educational initiatives, highlighting the importance of fostering both critical and creative thinking in higher education.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kenza Benabderrazik, Marion Lehner, Simon Gwara, Ndoda Zondo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Assessing students' motivation, learning, and skill transferability in a real-world project: Insights from the ETH Assistive Technology Challenge
Challenge-based learning addresses socially relevant real-world challenges and requires students to work closely together with stakeholders in a highly engaging and interdisciplinary manner. The newly established ‘Assistive Technology Challenge’ course at ETH Zurich promotes challenge-based learning by exposing Health Sciences and Technology students to diverse disciplines and skills of importance in the field of assistive technology. During the course, the students without an engineering background work together with a person with a physical disability to (co-)develop a personal technical solution for an individual challenge that the person encounters in their own daily life or during leisure activities. This work describes the course format, student assessment, and outcomes of the first edition of the course executed during the spring semester 2024. Further, it describes the outcomes of an online survey collecting students' feedback on the course and investigates how the chosen course format affected the learned competencies and students' motivation. Results show that the course format enabled students to achieve a successful project outcome, promoted high student motivation, and strengthened their competencies in areas expected to be relevant for their future careers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jessica Gantenbein, Gassert Roger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Integrating stakeholders in project-based transdisciplinary teaching and learning – the case of ‘Tackling Environmental Problems‘
In this reflection on a teaching practice, we present how we implement project-based transdisciplinary teaching and learning in the Bachelor of Environmental Science (hereafter BSc) course ‘Tackling Environmental Problems’ (‘Umweltproblemlösen’ in German, abbreviated as UPL hereafter) at ETH Zurich. First, we focus on the question of how stakeholders are involved in transdisciplinary higher education courses. Then, we present which stakeholders we involve in UPL and which roles they take. A (non-exhaustive) literature review of transdisciplinary courses in other institutions has shown that it is often not explicitly described which stakeholders, and especially in which roles, they are involved in a project-based transdisciplinary course. In UPL, we distinguish between stakeholders at the course level of the case study and stakeholders at the project level who are approached by the students for development of their sustainability projects. Finally, we discuss why we integrate stakeholders in our course and link this to the development of transdisciplinary competences. We conclude with a reflection on the challenges and opportunities of the stakeholders, lecturers and students, as well as experiences, reflections, and feedback from eight years of running this course.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marlene Mader, Carole Rapo, Christian Pohl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Teaching architecture through an energy and climate lens
Despite the increasing societal awareness of the climate crisis, considerations of outdoor and indoor climate, energy consumption and generation, and the environmental impact of material choices still represent a niche in architectural practice. Given the urgency of the issue, addressing these topics needs to be integrated in architectural design. In this work, we first describe a build-up of teaching formats and position them in view of learners’ competence development in architectural design through an energy and climate lens. We identify opportunities to refine our teaching instruments further and improve the learners' ability to independently integrate topics related to energy, emissions, climate, and comfort in the practice of design projects. We end with an outlook of an idealized build-up of these competencies across an architecture curriculum.
Copyright (c) 2025 Illias Hischier, Arno Schlüter, Christoph Waibel, Esther Borkowski, Lars Oliver Grobe, Maximilian Gester https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“Everything I love about physics” in a project-based undergraduate laboratory course
We report on the development and implementation of P+, a novel project-based physics lab course. In this inquiry-based format, students choose their own topics, design and build the experimental setups, and conduct their own experiments. We discuss the pedagogical rationale behind P+, its implementation within the existing lab course format, and the challenges and successes encountered in the first two semesters of its conduction. We assess the skill development via a student survey, tracking their self-perceived skill levels associated with a set of learning goals. We find that all learning objectives are achieved in the new format at least to the same extent as in the standard laboratory course. Particularly positive effects are observed in the categories ‘designing an experiment’ and ‘scientific communication’. In addition, students benefit from increased collaboration, a structured approach to project development, and the opportunity to explore their interests, which leads to exceptionally high motivation, a key factor for efficient learning.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andreas Eggenberger, Daniela Rupp, Linos Hecht, Barbara Schneider https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
How to develop and implement teaching projects in outdoor education
Learning through projects can raise interest and motivation, and support the construction of competencies, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary knowledge via working on real-life problems in realistic settings. One form of project-based learning is outdoor education, that is, situating learning and instruction in settings outside the regular classroom. We present a course for students in the teacher education program at ETH Zurich that implements project-based education on two layers: the course itself is project-based, and the pre-service teachers create project-based outdoor teaching units during the course. We describe how we balance freedom and guidance, and scaffolding in the course design. In addition, we report how students respond to and evaluate our course, and discuss challenges and opportunities for lecturers. By presenting sample projects and insights from the implementation and continuous development of the project-based course, we aim to inspire and guide lecturers at ETH Zurich and other universities who consider implementing project-based courses in their teaching.
Copyright (c) 2025 Christian Thurn, Adrian Zwyssig, Lennart Schalk, Hanspeter Gubelmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2023 Michèle Gemünden, Pia Scherrer, Benno Volk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Teaching supercomputing and software engineering skills to science and engineering students
We describe a newly created Master-level course about numerically solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on graphical processing units (GPUs), both on local machines, on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and supercomputers. The course is aimed at domain-science students, which we broadly define as non-computer science students, such as earth-science, physics, engineering, etc. students. Besides the core content, the course aims also at teaching other essential skills needed for the domain scientist to successfully conduct numerical research, including software engineering skills (e.g., git and GitHub, testing, documentation), tools (e.g., VSCode and remote HPC access), teamwork and project management. The course is research-based as it closely follows the workflows we use in our daily research activity. The course teaches its content through a hands-on, project-based approach with weekly assignments and two large projects as a core part of the course. We show that student grades and satisfaction is excellent, however, the high workload of the teachers needs refinements in future iterations of the course.
Copyright (c) 2023 Ludovic Räss, Mauro Werder, Ivan Utkin, Samuel Omlin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Students’ perceptions of active learning: Experiences from a course on urban ecological research
Preparing the next generation to address current and future ecological challenges requires creative and collaborative ways of problem framing and solving. Active learning formats have the potential to support the development of skills needed to address these challenges. For future development of active learning formats, it is important to understand students’ perceptions of different aspects of their learning experience and outcomes. This article is based on students’ feedback from a practical course on urban ecological research. In small groups, students develop a hypothesis and research design, conduct fieldwork, and then analyse and present the results. After completion of the course, I collected qualitative feedback from students and then coded it to assess students’ perception of their active learning experiences, separated by course framing, group work and supervision. The results show that students appreciate the independence to explore real-world problems in a supportive group atmosphere. Within group work, the division of tasks is perceived to lead to more efficiency, but at the same time hinders learning new skills if roles are distributed based on existing experience. Further challenges stem from the trade-offs between students who prefer closer supervision with pre-provided contents and those who perceive close supervision as disruptive or a lack of trust. I discuss how, according to self-determination theory, the learning climate provided by course framing, group work and supervision can strike a balance between needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. To improve, I suggest a predictable supervisory structure and full transparency to students about the active learning goals and challenges.
Copyright (c) 2023 Fritz Kleinschroth https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Teaching cross-disciplinarity in the natural sciences – a case for Natural Philosophy
Interdisciplinarity in the natural sciences is a phrase one regularly hears in the context of teaching and learning, at all levels of study, from the classroom to the research environment. But what do we really understand from this term? In most cases, from the perspectives of the physical and life sciences, it is used to describe the overlap of chemistry and materials science, molecular biology and genetics, or biochemistry and biophysics, for example. While these interconnections across different fields broaden the horizon of the student, they do not always allow them to situate their learning in a broader societal context. The natural sciences have the potential to solve many problems facing the future of our planet and these solutions come from interdisciplinary research. However, creating solutions is only part of the story. As scientists we also need to understand how to exploit our ideas, whether they should be exploited at all, and how our research fits into the world around us. To ensure future generations of scientists can both understand and solve the problems in the world around them, we need to broaden the concept of interdisciplinarity in teaching and learning. We argue that science teaching and learning must include cross-disciplinary interactions, that is, teaching a subject from the perspective of another subject, such as philosophy, or adopt different scientific philosophies to ensure the innovators of tomorrow can make well-balanced choices about the impact of their discoveries on communities and societies at large. This approach of cross-disciplinarity is not without challenges. Integrating humanities modules with science modules in the curriculum will be beneficial, as it will introduce cross-disciplinary perspectives into teaching in the natural sciences from the bottom up. This encourages us, as teachers, to view our subjects in a more philosophical manner, and impart this deeper perspective and understanding on our students. With a specific focus on the teaching of chemistry and its cognates, subjects that have less of a modern tradition of conceptual thinking, we provide literature arguments supporting the case for philosophy in science, perspectives on how to address cross-disciplinarity in chemistry teaching, and some classroom activity suggestions to support cross-disciplinary learning
Copyright (c) 2023 Joan Onate Narciso, Zarah Walsh-Korb https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
How to train the deliberate use of intuition
We aim to investigate how to professionally train our skill at using intuition deliberately because prior research has shown that intuition has the potential to outperform the analytical mind, especially in complex and uncertain situations that will become only more frequent in the years to come. Teaching people to learn how to use intuition can be particularly decisive because it represents a crucial soft skill for the next generation of critical and creative thinkers. By applying advanced bibliometric analysis techniques in this mapping study, we systematically explore and visualize intuition research to highlight potential methods to train the skill of deliberately using intuition in the classroom. Our Web of Science data set comprises 7,680 peer reviewed documents with 253,986 references published by 166,649 authors through the end of 2021. Despite these high numbers, intuition is an underexplored scientific field characterized by methodological challenges, some of which are due to its unconscious nature. Our study offers first insights into research that can enhance the use of intuition. Our main goal is inspiring future research to help reveal intuition’s unexploited educational potential, which can then stimulate new teaching initiatives.
Copyright (c) 2023 Katharina Fellnhofer, Ursula Renold https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Actor-Based Triage Training for Pharmacy Students
Background and Purpose: Triaging as a service in pharmacies aims to direct clients towards the right care stream and reduce the workload of other care givers. It is also a prerequisite for newly extended pharmacists’ dispensing competencies. Triaging requires the application of clinical knowledge for quick decision-making and effective communication skills, which may be practiced in actor-based training. We aimed to evaluate our newly established actor-based trainings on acute respiratory and abdominal symptoms for pre-registration pharmacy students in terms of student feedback and effectiveness. Educational activity and Setting: The trainings included passive lectures on history taking, clinical examination, and triage, and active learning segments involving case simulation with actors. Actors were recruited from a drama class and received training to establish their medical knowledge for improvised reactions. The simulations portrayed different personalities of pharmacy clients, which later included actors with little time and understanding for history taking. During the simulations, students had to diagnose the clinical pictures by themselves, applying their newly acquired knowledge. After the simulations, the focus was on mutual feedback between actors, students, and moderators with an emphasis on perspective change and communication. Simulations were held online. Evaluation data was collected with a feedback form and a pre-to-post questionnaire. A one-sided Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare students’ pre-to-post changes in self-reported confidence levels. Findings: Students majorly described the training with the actors to be very realistic (70.0%); they felt comfortable, but still needed to get used to the situation (50.0%); they learned a lot about themselves (50.0%); and the feedback from the actors was found to be helpful (63.3%) and beneficial for learning about their own perceptions of other people (33.3%). The changes in self-reported confidence levels were statistically significant. Summary: This evaluation showed that actor-based training can foster pharmacy students’ confidence in triaging of acute respiratory and abdominal symptoms, even when conducted virtually. Besides effectively promoting decision-making, working with actors additionally allowed to practise different communication styles and to confront students with various personalities of pharmacy clients.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dominik Stämpfli, Angela Küng Krähenmann, Irene Vogel Kahmann, Peter Wiedemeier, Andreas Gutzeit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Graduate Collective in Earth Sciences: Promoting network building among doctoral students
Doctoral students need to acquire a large skillset to meet the numerous and diverse challenges they face during their studies. Several factors can have a positive influence on how students navigate their doctoral projects independent of their supervisor’s commitment. These include informal networks of doctoral students that are regarded as key components to scientific success. Although there are opportunities for building informal networks within individual research groups, few opportunities exist at the institute and department level. Several research groups within the Department of Earth Sciences (D-ERDW) gathered to launch the Graduate Collective in the spring semester 2022. In a series of four seminars and ten workshops, we made use of the common thematic framework to provide 16 doctoral students with the tools and resources they need to navigate their graduate studies. Students worked closely together on the various topics in groups of different sizes, thus enabling them to build networks with co-students from related research fields. In addition, informal networking events were organized that allowed the students to deepen and stabilize their new connections with co-students. Students could earn 2 credit points for taking part in this course. We evaluate and reflect the effect of our course on network building based observations made during the course. Overall, the results underline our hypothesis that a teaching format installed between the department and group level enables participants to build networks of interpersonal support.
Copyright (c) 2023 Caroline Welte, Adrian Gilli, Jordon Hemingway https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Advancing Design for Additive Manufacturing Education: A Focus on Computational Skills and Competencies
The summer school is realized as a joint teaching project between several partner universities under the auspices of the IDEA League alliance. The school trains students and young researchers on exploring and applying the potential of computational-based strategies in design for additive manufacturing, while engaging in dedicated team working activities. The aim of this work is to report on and discuss the success of the summer school in terms of the learning goals achievement. The work is based on the results of a one-day workshop with the summer school alumni showing how the acquired knowledge, skills and competences impacted their studies, research, and professional careers in a long-term after the course is finished, and outlining possible course content improvements to plan the summer school in 2023 that will take place with physical presence.
Copyright (c) 2023 Serena Graziosi, Jun Wu, Zjenja Doubrovski, Nicholas Meisel, Martin Schütz, Tino Stankovic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Fostering social and personal competencies in higher education
We describe the implementation of a competence framework comprising social and personal competencies and traditional subject- and method-specific competencies at ETH Zurich. We use mixed data to document the university's need for the framework. We find the incorporation of different perspectives about competencies pivotal for developing the framework, while joint information-sharing and competence-building enable the implementation of the framework within the university's services and educational offers. Our paper contributes to the debate in higher education on why and how universities change to prepare future-ready graduates. First, it elucidates the competencies becoming increasingly crucial for future graduates and how to conceptualise them. Second, it leverages examples showing how to promote a holistic set of competencies within the university, including the student support service, among more traditional implementation levels like degree programmes or courses.
Copyright (c) 2023 Barbara La Cara, Michèle Gemünden, Barbara Koch-Kiennast https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Seminars: What They Do and Do Not Do
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Copyright (c) 2022 Mark Anthony, Iris Hordijk, Nako Nakatsuka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Sensitizing future teachers to psychological research on gender and STEM
What leads less women to pursue STEM careers? What does research find about differences in girls’ and boys’ educational trajectories? Students and faculty may have heard about gender bias, the leaky pipeline, gender stereotypes, or gender differences in the brain, but it is often difficult to grasp the underlying complexity of these topics. As social scientists in a technical university, we think that learning more closely about research in this field is helpful in developing a balanced and critical perspective. We have thus developed a course on gender issues in education and STEM for students in the teacher education program at ETH Zurich. In this paper, we first introduce some of the main issues in the context of gender and STEM, around which our course is designed. We then describe the pillars of our course. The course is interactive, with students presenting and critically discussing psychological and educational research. We walk students through the various controversies in the field: the nature-nurture question, gender differences vs. similarities, biases vs. interests, gender stereotypes and potential interventions. In a final assignment, students in small groups integrate several papers into a blog-post. Finally, we describe how students respond to our course, and discuss the challenges we as lecturers experience throughout.
Copyright (c) 2022 Michal Berkowitz, Thomas Braas, Christian M. Thurn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Improving the learning environment in the Department of Physics: a peer mentoring program for first-year female physicists alongside changes in the lecture programme
In 2018, a D-PHYS evaluation of the Basisjahr (first Bachelor year) pass rates showed an imbalance of the pass rates between genders in the first and second attempt: the pass rate for female students was only 32 % compared to 46 % for their male colleagues. There was also feedback from female students to staff about problematic challenges during this first-year experience. In addition, the number of women starting the physics course was low, only 17% of the first-year students in 2020 (e.g., 45 out of 250). These factors raised concerns and questions, and an investigation was undertaken in 2019 to examine the first-year learning experience and to identify if there were issues that could be influencing the gender imbalance in pass rates. The study involved 21 interviews of randomly selected students (11 women and 10 male students) who had successfully completed the first year in the last 12 years. This article describes the outcomes of these interviews, and the measures that resulted from this study. The interviews showed a distinct difference in experiences of the genders in the first year, and a consistent highlighting of problematic issues in the learning environment. In 2020, changes to the first-year physics learning environment followed, with a particular focus on a project to improve the situation for the female students. First, a peer-mentoring program was established for first-year female physics students. We report on how and why we established the program, the events that took place during the academic year 2020/2021 and present the evaluation data. Second, a number of changes were made to the physics lectures and exercise classes in 2020, which were designed to improve the learning environment for all. Finally, and in parallel, an anonymous grading system was introduced, to ensure that the differences in pass rates were not affected by unidentified biases. The paper concludes with a reflection on the impact of these multiple measures, an outline of plans to expand peer mentoring to all first-year students, and the importance of an ongoing evaluation to examine the effectiveness of the changes introduced.
Copyright (c) 2022 Viola Valentina Vogler-Neuling, Klara Berg, Mattias Beck, Anna M. Garry https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
A Case Study: The D-MAVT Mentoring Programme.
The peer-to-peer mentoring programme of the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering (D-MAVT) at ETH Zurich started out as a way to support young women and thus promote and retain talent. Despite various efforts, the percentage of women in this department is increasing only very slowly. The mentoring programme, first introduced in 2017, was intended to facilitate the start of their studies. Regular surveys among participating mentors and mentees confirmed the success of the programme. However, it also became gradually apparent that mentoring for all could be even more promising. On the one hand, both men and women struggle with the same initial challenges. On the other, the extension of the programme would forestall any criticism or feeling of neglect/discrimination on the part of male students. Above all, it would also prevent women from being seen as needy – a perception which was the exact opposite of the programme’s goals. Today, D-MAVT mentoring includes first-year students of both genders. To further professionalise the programme, in 2021 D-MAVT organised its first ever kick-off workshop for all mentors. More ideas to improve the D-MAVT mentoring programme are being developed continuously based on regular surveys and dialogue with the students.
Copyright (c) 2022 Inken De Wit, Ievgeniia Bedel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The new vessels of knowledge: Exploring the meaning of cultural diversity in the age of globalization of higher education at ETH
Universities worldwide, driven by the impetus to be more diverse, are increasingly imbuing an international outlook constituted by individuals from all over the world. ETH Zurich, like most universities in its league, attracts a significant international student pool: The 23’420 students at ETH are from 121 countries, with 30% of its master’s and 53% of its doctoral students being international students (ETH Zurich 2020). Consequently, initiatives such as the Respect Campaign, the rETHink project, and trainings are steps towards ensuring an inclusive environment for the diverse community which constitutes ETH Zurich (Baumann 2020). However, there are important questions which arise in contemplation of what gives these initiatives substance: What issues do they seek to address and to what extent do they fulfill the prerogative to inspire and uphold ETH’s values in learning and teaching? In this article, the African Students Association of Zurich (ASAZ)[1] seeks to explore these questions and, more precisely, tries to investigate what the interrelationship is between globalization of higher education and cultural diversity goals at ETH. By designing a research project that explores the experiences of domestic and international students with minority backgrounds, this article intends to contribute to diversity studies by showing how student initiatives and the issues that sustain them can be of incremental value to creating a more inclusive learning and teaching environment. [1] www.asaz.ch
Copyright (c) 2022 Nana Diarra Dit Konté, Kyllian Douhou, Kingdom Karuwo, Christopher Yola https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/