Teaching Excellence Fellowship for Marianna Bevova
ERIBA researcher Marianna Bevova has a great interest in education in the field of ageing biology. One of her recent contributions is her involvement in setting up the well received Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Why do we age? Molecular mechanisms of ageing”. And Marianna’s efforts have not gone unnoticed: On October 14, she was awarded a Teaching Excellence Fellowship by the University of Groningen.
The Teaching Excellence Fellowship (TEF) is meant to stimulate innovation and excellence in teaching. The fellowship provides teachers with an assistant to aid them in implementing their novel ideas for improving education. For Marianna, this means exploring how video material from the MOOC on ageing can be used optimally in the courses that ERIBA is involved in.
“We plan to incorporate video material to the course syllabus thus creating time to more personal communication during classes.” says Marianna. In her opinion, good teaching involves taking into account that every student and class are unique, and require a different teaching approach. If part of the course material can be studied at home in the form of a video lecture, a teacher would have more time to address the needs of the students.
The video material from the MOOC will not be used to reduce teacher-student contact hours, but to spend those hours in a more efficient way. To find the optimal way to make video lectures an inherent part of a course, different setups will be tested during the course “Molecular Biology of Ageing and Age-related Diseases” taught by ERIBA PI Liesbeth Veenhoff. Both the course and the rerun of the MOOC start on November 2. The assistance the TEF will provide, allows Marianna to analyse the different setups thoroughly, and optimize the setup for the 2016 edition of the course on “Molecular Biology of Ageing and Age-related Diseases”.
We are looking forward to see the results. Marianna, congratulations on your award from everyone at ERIBA!
For more information on the TEF, please visit the website of the University of Groningen Honours College.
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