Five Inspiring Course (Re-)Designs

The innovation of teaching and, correspondingly, learning in higher education has been producing numerous examples of inspiring and stimulating course designs and redesigns only too rarely reported. Tying in with Strecker et al. (2018), the present compilation adds five examples of innovative course (re-)designs, each including a reflection on student and instructor appraisal (‘‘lessons learned’’). Intended as a contribution to sharing teaching experiences much like flying pilots practice knowledge sharing, and to inspire further reflection on teaching and learning in higher education, the contributions in this compilation discuss course (re-)designs from introductory courses to more advanced courses in five different institutional settings. Ulrike Baumöl discusses the challenges of redesigning an existing course and places the challenges she faces as a course instructor in the wider context of societal change. Among others, mixing media including videos produced by the course instructor and videos produced by the students considerably changes the learning experience and receives positive student feedback. Dimitris Karagiannis reports on a newly designed course and the corresponding sophisticated set of software tools to enable students to experience the interlinkage of complementary conceptual models. He underlines the importance of conveying the value of models and modeling to learners as a key success factor. Agnes Koschmider delivers insights into a particularly innovative learning approach based on a crowdsourcing scheme in which students work with a software tool that adapts to individual learning progress. She describes workable solutions to the challenge of incentivizing students to participate, and reports on positive effects on the participating learners’ performance. Monique Snoeck details her stepwise refinements of a course on conceptual modeling to develop elaborate means for automated feedback on object-oriented models, e.g., UML class diagrams. Teaching this course for many semesters, she has continuously been receiving positive feedback from students on her course revisions. Rüdiger Zarnekow reports on the redesign of an introductory undergraduate course transformed from a traditional lecture-style to a blended learning approach with short online video lectures, unit-based worksheets and inverted classroom face-to-face meetings. Again, the redesign was positively acknowledged by the learners and, meanwhile, more than 1000 students have successfully completed the redesigned course.