| Abstract |
Many of us who are involved in teaching are familiar with the problem: you have designed an (in your opinion) very appealing course, have prepared adequate teaching material, and have prepared interesting lectures, but for some reason your students don't show up in class. Or alternatively, they do show up during the first lecture, just to hear about the organisational details of the course, but after that they remain absent until the very last lecture before the final exam, where they pose questions about all the topics that you have addressed during the weeks in between. The results are usually evident: those students that missed most of your classes have a substantially higher probability of failing the exam, and even the ones that pass do this with very mediocre grades, often obtained by means of 'shallow learning', rather than studying the material in depth. In this WAI presentation, I want to talk with you about this problem, and about potential solutions for it. In particular, I would like to share with you the results of an 'experiment' I performed in the context of the 2nd year Bachelor course 'Integrative Modelling'. In this course, I tried to enhance student engagement by presenting the course as a kind of 'game', where students could collect virtual 'coins' throughout the course. Although there is still room for improvement, this setup seems to have succeeded in the sense that it made the course (as well as the lectures) more attractive to students, and stimulated them to study its contents in more depth.
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