Degrees of Freedom

We bring this episode to you featuring Selena Dolderer, a coach, trainer and consultant in the BSS faculty at the University of Groningen. Today we touched upon everyone's personal experiences of studying, working and combining that with life. As an experienced consultant, Selena shares with us a lot of tips for students starting out at university, or for those already studying, some great advice...

We are delighted to present to you this episode featuring Dr Brian Ostafin and Dr Marcello Seri. In this podcast we touch upon the definition and origin of failure, as well as the overall difference and importance between successes and failures in multiple aspects of life. Alongside these experts in their fields, we delve deep into the meaning of failure and how we can reflect on it in order to gr...

We're really excited to share the conversation we recently had with Dr Maria Ioannou and Dr Ferdinand Lewis on the topic of project-based learning (PBL). PBL is a learning method that centres very much on the student's experience and accentuates active participation and creation. It's common in some fields of higher education, but less so in the social sciences. With Maria's and Ferdinand's experi...

We're joined in this episode by Laurent Krook who is e-Learning coordinator at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences to talk about live streams. After two years of hybrid or fully online lectures, we seem to be moving away from live streamed lectures as the default. Changes are always challenging though, so we discuss how such decisions are made and communicated. In the process, we also a...

This is part B of our conversations with the winners of the 2022 Best Practice in Teaching and Learning Awards at Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen. In this episode, we speak with Rozemarijn van der Ploeg and Tina Kretschmer from the department of Educational Science in Groningen. They share with us their views on teaching (and teaching awards!), the guiding...

A festive episode this time, focusing on the 2022 Best Practice in Teaching and Learning Awards and the winners from the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen. Each year, the four programmes in the Faculty nominate teachers for the Best Practice award and we're lucky to speak with all of them. In this first part, we speak with Michelle de Jong from the departmen...

It's the holy grail of teaching: engaged students! But what does this mean exactly and how do we know when we have it? In our third episode, we speak with Dr Jolien Mouw, assistant professor in Education Science at the University of Groningen about how to think about student engagement and how to achieve it! - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + - - - + -...

The lecture! Mainstay of university teaching for hundreds of years, mow much maligned for not promoting active learning, for not focusing enough on the student, for being ineffective and uninteresting. For being too old-school. Is the lecture dead and should we think of it in those terms? In this episode, we speak with Dr Simon Dalley, lecturer in Social Psychology at the University of Groningen a...

In the first episode of Degrees of Freedom, we try to figure out what the point of University education is. How much of it is structured development and how can students think about creating their own self-development path? To help us navigate these issues, we speak with Klaas Van Veen, Professor in Education Studies and Vice Dean of Education at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences of t...