Today was the closing session of the Terrestrial Ecology Group’s Biodiversity course. Our course was given entirely online, and we never met the students in person. A challenge. We uploaded weekly asynchronous lectures (most of them by my colleague), combined with synchronous paper seminars. During these seminar sessions we discussed one or more papers on a specific theme related to biodiversity which we tried to link to the theme of the week’s lecture.
Today there were no papers to prepare.
Instead, we discussed our course evaluations and used Miro – a platform on which you can have a collaborative online whiteboard – to get more in-depth feedback on the course weekly content. It was interesting to see the student’s perspective, which sometimes differed a lot from ours. In some opinions they varied a lot as a group, whereas in others they were like-minded. There is of course also room for improvement, and we were given practical suggestions on how to make a better course next year.
The cherry on the pie was a lovely compliment on my ability to explain things and place them in a practical context. This made my day!
Thanks to our students for being our teachers today.
Robin Heinen 