Do it and learn -
Educating engineers at
DTU Mechanical
Engineering
By Lisbeth Lassen
Education is a highly prioritised area at the department, and
during last year, several initiatives have been taken to develop
the competences of the lecturers at DTU Mechanical Engineering.
Associate Professor Claus Thorp Hansen is pedagogical coordinator,
and he coordinates activities between the department and LearningLab
DTU, a centre offering pedagogical training at the university. He has
been pedagogical coordinator since 2012, and in cooperation with
LearningLab DTU he has developed and is co-responsible for the UP
education (University Pedagogy for Experienced Teachers).
“This summer we held a department seminar in order to educate more
pedagogical supervisors at the department,” Claus Thorp Hansen tells.
A pedagogical supervisor is assigned to every new teacher when they
enroll in UDTU (Education in University Teaching at DTU) in order to
qualify their teaching. “At our seminar, we spent half a day discussing
what kinds of profiles we would like the graduates from the different
Master’s programmes to have. And for the first time, all sections
but one has a pedagogical supervisor, so now it’s possible for a new
teacher at any section to have a supervisor with a different scientific
focus. This way we avoid the temptation of discussing our research, and
not our teaching.”
Claus Thorp Hansen describes good teaching today: “For teaching to
be excellent, it is fundamental to be aware that the more we lecture
as teachers, the less active the students are. Learning happens when
you are working actively with a subject, and if the students just sit in
an auditorium and passively listen and maybe even lose concentration,
they will not achieve much. The essence of excellent teaching is to
create learning situations where the students are working actively with
the subject, and where the purpose and application is clear.”
“For teaching to be excellent, it is fundamental
to be aware that the more we lecture as
teachers, the less active the students are.
Updating and qualifying our skills and competences in teaching is
important, as students today often have very different learning
preferences or strategies than we, their lecturers, had when we were
students years ago. So pedagogical strategies need to change and
expand focus, and this is part of the course content in the UDTU and UP
programmes.
The power of a relevant case
Activating the students is already part of the teaching in many courses
at DTU. Professor Tim McAloone, Lecturer of the Year 2017, uses cases
and examples of problems as an integrated part of his teaching. He is
course responsible for the Master’s course “Development and operation
of product/service-systems” and the Bachelor courses “Product life and
environmental issues” and “Sustainability in engineering solutions”.
“I use examples the students can relate to, simply to start them
thinking,” Tim McAloone says. “I have many years of experience with
using cases, which also includes some bad experiences of using case
examples that are too complex for the students to understand – and
this is not the way to do it. One needs to find examples where the
22 Do it and learn - Educating engineers at DTU Mechanical Engineering