Online course: Introduction to Higher Education

Earn the Basic Level Certificate for Teaching in Higher Education of the Bavarian Universities in one semester!

This blended learning course provides you with a theoretical as well as practical introduction to Higher Education. You will gain essential skills for teaching in the university context, from course planning and evaluation to student assessment. You will put your newly gained theoretical knowledge into practice by participating in peer hospitation visits or by planning and delivering a lesson.

By the end of the course, you will be able to see the links between course content, learning objectives, teaching methods, use of media and student assessment, and apply this knowledge to your course planning and design. You will learn student-centred teaching approaches and apply the underlying principles to your own teaching by designing a coherent and didactically sound lesson plan.

This course is designed as a blended learning seminar. There will be synchronous sessions via Zoom in which you will receive suggestions and ideas to help you plan and design courses. Each session will focus on a different aspect to consider when planning your lessons. These sessions will be paired with asynchronous learning phases in which you will work with various materials provided by FAU’s learning management system (StudOn).

At the end of the course, participants will achieve the Basic Level Certificate for Teaching in Higher Education by demonstrating the possession of basic knowledge through the completion of 60 work units (WUs or Arbeitseinheiten [AE]) of 45 minutes each, from all five fields of competence (A-E).

Portfolio requirements:

• Lesson plan and outline for a 90min teaching session (approx. 5-7 pages)
• Peer hospitation with reflection report (approx. two pages) or video recording of a teaching lecture (approx. 20 minutes)
• Reflection on the learning process in the course (approx. 2-3 pages)
• Different contributions to your working groups and the learning management system (StudOn)

Participants will design a teaching project, look at which rhetorical elements can support the learning objectives, which assessment methods allow students to look at their learning process, consider which methods of (self-)evaluation can be used and which forms of examination are suitable and how students can be advised in the context of this course. Participants are expected to continuously work on their teaching projects throughout the course as well as with the learning materials provided.