During the last months, I had the privilege to participate in the course A!Peda Intro (5 cr) as a newly started professor at Aalto University.
Overall, I found the course highly useful. The course gave the opportunity to meet peers at different schools of Aalto University; to familiarize with the many dimensions related to “teaching” (better, learning); and to see many ways of teaching/learning in action. It came to me also just at a good moment, as I am about to start one course (CHEM-E1130 Catalysis) and planning two other courses (CHEM-E1140 Catalysis for Biomass Refining and Licentiate Seminar on Industrial Chemistry and Catalysis, no code yet). From A!Peda Intro, I got many valuable hints that will help me progress. I warmly recommend the A!Peda Intro course to other people who have just started at Aalto University as well as to more seasoned professionals who are open to freshen up their teaching methods. The time spent for A!Peda Intro was well spent.
Today was the last day of the course, and there was a special treat waiting at the end that I want to mention in this post: senior lecturer Marko Keskinen (@keskma) sharing his experiences on flipped learning. The course concerned is the bachelor-level course “Vesi- ja ympäristötekniikka ENY-C2003,” Aalto internal (?) link to the MyCourse 2017 workspace here. News items have been published on that earlier in English and in Finnish. One thing that I found especially delighting in addition to the fresh view of teaching was that – in accord with openness as one of the guiding priciples of Aalto University, course feedback has been shared at the course website (see: Kurssipalaute). I don’t think that such open sharing is a widespread practice at Aalto University. I hope for more of such openness in the future and I am willing to contribute to that increased openness myself.
