TU/e, WUR, UU, and UMC Utrecht are collaborating to innovate their curricula, make them more widely available, and develop joint programmes. Several interrelated projects are ongoing or have been completed to create future-proof, innovative educational concepts.
Projects
The impact of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teamwork on students’ adaptive expertise: Employing artificial intelligence, bibliometrics and dashboards as measurement tools.
Students need to develop adaptive expertise – the ability to perform at a high level in challenging situations – to be able to take up grand societal challenges. Being exposed to multiple perspectives can help developing adaptive expertise, which is the case in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teamwork. Whereas interdisciplinarity refers to the integration of different bodies of knowledge, transdisciplinarity refers to interaction between students and non-academic actors.
However, we lack empirical evidence for how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teamwork impacts students’ adaptive expertise and solid measurements of adaptive expertise that can be used in education. We tackle both issues by addressing the research question: How does transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in teamwork impact students’ adaptive expertise development? In this project design scenarios for measuring adaptive expertise by using artificial intelligence are created. And the impact of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teamwork on adaptive expertise in challenge-based learning courses along two dimensions: (1) proximity and (2) process is investigated. We use the cosine similarity measure and a dashboard to track the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborative efforts of the team. The project results in two scientific articles and innovative assessment tools that can be used in education.
Exploring students’ self-regulated learning capabilities within challenge-based learning courses.
The EWUU alliance encourages innovative pedagogies that foster complex skills such as interdisciplinary reasoning, critical thinking and self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. This project is aimed to identify groups of students’ based on their SRL-behaviour in challenge-based learning (CBL) courses and relate such patterns to their individual characteristics (motivation and prior knowledge) and learning outcomes. To do so, we will connect to the CBL courses at UU and WUR to collect logfile data in the online learning environments of the courses to have insight into students’ SRL behaviour and to gather data about students’ perceived SRL-behaviour. Students’ grades at the end of the course will be used as a measure of achievement. The findings of this study will provide us with rich information about the SRL patterns of students and their behaviours during CBL tasks that would be beneficial for educators from both practical and scientific perspectives.
Developing Adaptive Expertise in Higher Education: Enhancing Innovative Teaching Practices through Virtual Reality Simulations.
This project employs Virtual Reality (VR) technology to develop adaptive expertise among university teachers, enabling them to balance efficiency and innovation. Adaptive expertise is crucial as it allows practitioners to continuously adapt their practice to unexpected or novel situations. However, professionals need opportunities to safely occupy “change” environments to develop adaptive expertise and exercise adaptive performance (Pelgrim et al., 2022). To support university teachers to develop adaptive expertise at scale, we will create VR scenarios that simulate unexpected or challenging situations in educational settings, such as transdisciplinary challenge-based learning environments (T-CBL).
Within this project, three studies will be conducted:
- Development of the VR scenarios
- Assessment of adaptive expertise using VR2
- Use of the VR application for a professional development intervention to improve adaptive expertise and performance. This entails exploring the potential of VR as a measurement and professional development intervention tool.
Considering the limited empirical evidence on adaptive expertise development and measurement (Pelgrim et al., 2022), we aim to inform research and practice by empowering educators to enhance their skills in T-CBL, mitigating resource constraints. This will enable educational institutions to keep pace with the evolving demands of the educational landscape and provide students with the best possible learning experience.