“I’m always curious about new teaching opportunities, but when I participate in a project it has to be more than just a little experiment. I try to actually achieve something new.”

“Blended learning, a combination of online- and contact education, is fairly common today and there are plenty of digital tools available. The choice of tools is a matter of taking a good look at the options and picking the ones that are right for you. If you then try out some of the tools together with your colleagues, it helps get rid of some of the obstacles.”

“But regardless of which tool you choose, in blended teaching you have to think more about your course than you would if you kept teaching using traditional methods. You have to think about how you offer the material, and how you structure it. What do the students actually need, and what do they have difficulty with? If you give lectures ‘live’, then you can kind of play it by ear, but you can’t get away with that online.”

Practice
“Over the past year, I’ve mainly worked with  TrainTool and  Communicate!. I came across TrainTool via Science Educate-it, the faculty programme that supports lecturers in developing blended teaching. We developed Communicate! together with Computer Science students as part of a joint project with Computer Science, Veterinary Medicine, Medicine, Psychology and Pharmaceutical Sciences.”

“TrainTool helps you practice competencies and skills. You look into the camera and react to a video in which one person says something to another. Then you can watch your own reaction. So you have to learn how to formulate your answer properly, and it’s good for learning non-verbal communication. We use the tool to prepare for the pharmaceutical anamnesis in the third year of the Bachelor’s programme.”

“Communicate! is a serious game that lets players practice having conversations. In the game, the player has a conversation with an avatar, and in the process they learn about structure and formulation. They also automatically receive written feedback and a score after every conversation. We use it in the first year of the Master’s programme to help practice consultations with customers.”

“The great thing about Communicate! is that you as a lecturer can enter conversation scenarios yourself, and for each answer option you can choose from up to 15 emotions for the avatar to display.”

A goodblend
““These tools gave students an extra chance to practice conducting professional conversations. That wasn’t an option in the past. It’ll take some time before we know what effect the tools have had. For example, Communicate! wasn’t blended well into the curriculum. It was too much of a loose element, and many students never used it. If there aren’t any consequences for that, then of course they won’t do it.”

“TrainTool is integrated more into communication education, but communication isn’t an integrated part of the specialist course in which it was used. The curriculum revision that we’re working on at Pharmaceutical Sciences will address that problem.”

“So we’ve noticed that the integration of online tools in your education is extremely important. That’s why this year I’m going to offer e-learning modules with reading texts, assignments, videos, and knowledge clips to help prepare for the live teaching moments, to make the online component an integral element of the entire training course.”