One out of three professionals experience high pressure in their work. Together with the constantly changing world of education, where student numbers increase vastly and opportunities of online education are almost endless, the creativity of our teachers are pushed to a new level. How do we let students experience the matter without logistic problems or taking up too much time from our coaches, mentors and teachers? How do we assess our students effectively, without loss in quality?
As a TU Delft Education-Fellow my focus is on the field of effective learning. Most literature is written about increasing the effect in learning practices, though, less is written about how to do this in a more efficient way. In general, three types of literature can be found within this field: (i) literature about Getting Things Done; (ii) literature introducing organizational approaches like Lean into education; and (iii) literature giving teachers tips and tricks on how to teach more effectively and/or efficiently. Unfortunately, literature in the latter group is scarce for the higher-education field and mainly focuses on primary and secondary schools.
To improve teaching quality without overloading the teacher we came up with a simple idea, developing an online cookbook for engineering teachers in higher education. In this cookbook teachers can share their teaching tricks, snippets and approaches with others in the community. We have developed an accessible way of sharing these “recipes” within the teaching community in an online platform. To kick-start the online community we have developed workshops which have been successfully implemented several times at different faculties within the TU Delft. This paper will present the approach, the results of the workshops, and the online cookbook as a result, not only sharing materials but also ideas and teaching approaches.
