License to Teach

It is my great pleasure to announce that I have received my University Teaching Qualification (UTQ), essentially my license to teach. The UTQ (Basiskwalificatie Onderwijs, BKO in Dutch) is a proof of teaching skills for university teaching staff, which allows you to demonstrate a proven ability to develop and teach courses at university level. It is recognized by all Dutch universities.

One of the most important things I have learned during the UTQ trajectory is the constructive alignment method for course design. I already knew that aligning goals, execution, and assessment was an important part of course design, yet challenging to do in practice. I appreciate that the constructive alignment workshops not only communicated the importance of this alignment, but also provided the tools (e.g. specification tables and tips for assessment) to identify and address misalignments. Constructive alignment may not be the only way to approach course design, but I see it as a very useful method and a good starting point from which further exploration can be done.

One of my stated goals was to learn how to make my lectures more interactive. This is something I knew was important to further improve my teaching, but I did not quite know how to achieve. This was addressed by the workshop on activating teaching that came paired with the excellent list of 50 Classroom Assessment Teachniques (CATs)  by Angelo and Cross. Based on this material, I have now significantly increased the level of interaction and formative assessment in my course Embedded Software and Systems.

Lastly, the module about organizing teaching was very important to lift my view from my course and start looking more at the program that provides the context, in my case the Master of Software Engineering program. Being aware of this context not only makes my course better, but also the program, resulting in a better educational experience for the students. Interviewing people in the program for this module also provided a trigger to go talk to colleagues and build a network that will help both my research and education at UvA going forward.