Stories about Studying and Teaching
The world is changing, and so is university teaching and learning. Find out how UZH educators are working together to develop new teaching ideas and advance the university as a whole.
Medical student Nasir still seems unsure of himself in conversations with patients, according to the feedback he got in his clinical examination class. Nasir now wants to find out how he can improve his communication skills and confidence.
The challenge
The Swiss catalogue of learning objectives for human medicine (PROFILES) follows a skills-based approach: the PROFILES catalogue defines the roles, professional activities and situations that students need to master in everyday medical practice. In order to achieve these learning objectives, it’s not enough for students to pore over textbooks – as well as learning theory, they need to acquire hard and soft skills. Whereas the previous curriculum focused on imparting and testing theory, the new curriculum focuses on clinical thinking and practice. Clinical skills are no longer seen as something medics will just pick up on the job: instead, students will now receive explicit training and be tested in these areas during their studies. This change of approach requires a complete overhaul of the classical medical program to make it a skills-oriented program. But how exactly will the existing and deeply traditional curriculum be changed to incorporate the new learning objectives and teaching concepts?
Making it happen
Using evidence-based educational approaches for medicine, and in close collaboration with other medical schools, the Faculty of Medicine’s curriculum development team has come up with an overall strategy for skills-oriented medical training at UZH. The project is supported by the UZH Teaching Fund as part of the “program_innovation” funding line. It is split into three sub-projects – learning support, new assessment formats, and faculty development – which together promised to usher in a modern culture of teaching and learning at the faculty.
“To develop their skills, students need regular feedback,” says Anna Brunello, who is responsible for implementing learning support structures. In coaching sessions offered every three to six months, students will have the opportunity to reflect on their strengths as well as areas with room for improvement, and adapt their own learning strategies accordingly. The multiple-choice exams used hitherto are far too limited in terms of providing students with constructive feedback on their skills. “We need to develop new formative assessments that show students’ potential – for example, simulations or reflective exercises,” says Judith Engeler Dusel, overall project leader at the Faculty of Medicine. The reform process will be closely accompanied by the faculty development team, who will introduce the new educational concept to teaching staff and deliver training on how to implement the new approach in the classroom.
The solution
Engeler Dusel and Brunello are currently trying out the abovementioned coaching with 36 students and six members of the professorial staff from the Joint Medical Master’s program run by UZH and the University of Lucerne, to test the feasibility and success of this kind of learning support. In preparation for the coaching session, students reflect on an e-portfolio, which contains their own experience notes, ongoing assessments, and end-of-unit exam results. Ideally the students already have a question or two in mind ahead of the session – like Nasir.
The coaching takes place in groups of six students led by an instructor who is also a trained coach. The coach asks guiding questions and uses coaching techniques to nudge the students toward independently identifying a way to fill the gaps in their skills or knowledge. For medical students, personal development is just as important as subject knowledge. The coachees therefore discover how to develop their own strategies for dealing with individual challenges, overcoming psychological stumbling blocks, or learning new material using evidence-based approaches. The aim of the learning support is for students to become Master Adaptive Learners who take a self-directed and lifelong attitude to education.
The groups of six are deliberately mixed, with one student from each year of the medical degree. “Students can support each other and develop their own coaching skills in the process”, says Brunello. Studies also show that students who feel socially connected perform better and are less likely to drop out of university.
Our teaching community
This form of learning support is unique in Switzerland and is also unknown in most larger medical schools around the world. But even the best curriculum development concept will fail if people aren’t on the same page. That’s why training for teaching staff, as provided by the faculty development team, is at the heart of the overall strategy. “We want to get the whole faculty excited about this new approach,” says Engeler Dusel. From 2024, the curriculum development team will give a first group of instructors an introduction to the new educational concepts and support them to successfully implement the new approach in the classroom. Those staff will then deliver the same training to other instructors, thereby creating a multiplier effect. In this way, knowledge and skills will spread quickly and easily among the teaching staff across the whole faculty.
The experiences gained by the Faculty of Medicine in redesigning its curriculum are of value for the rest of the university too, as other disciplines are also starting to move toward planning curricula that are skills-based and focused on learning objectives.
Project: program_innovation 2023– MeF Curriculum Development
Level: Bachelor’s and Master’s programs
Project leaders: Prof. Dr. med. Dominik Schaer, Dr. Yasmin Bayer, KD Dr. med. MME Judith Engeler, pract. med. Micha Gundelfinger, Dr. med. MME Anna Brunello, Dr. Nina Galushko-Jäckel, PD Dr. med. Fabian Morsbach
Faculty: Faculty of Medicine
The Future of Teaching at UZH Is ...
In the “City without Papers” project, students collaboratively investigate undocumented migrants’ precarious living conditions. This new type of teaching format is devoted to addressing current questions in urban studies research and in the process challenges traditional roles in science and teaching.
How do undocumented migrants live in Zurich? What problems do they face, for example when searching for housing? Students from UZH were hot on the trail of such questions in the 2023 Spring Semester.
The challenge
In the “City without Papers” project, teaching staff and students conduct research together with undocumented migrants and in cooperation with employees of the Zurich Information Office for Undocumented Migrants (Sans-Papiers Anlaufstelle Zürich (SPAZ)). “We don’t want to sit in an ivory tower. We want to shape and design research and teaching collaboratively,” urban researcher Julie Ren says. The challenge was to translate the principles of cooperative transdisciplinary research, tried and tested in urban studies, into teaching.
Making it happen
The research-based teaching format “City without Papers” was devised by the Züri Urban initiative being run by the Social Geography and Urban Studies unit of the UZH Department of Geography. Urban researcher Julie Ren and social geography professor Hanna Hilbrandt have already conducted the elective module with undocumented migrants and the Zurich Information Office for Undocumented Migrants two times. In this module, Master’s students experiment with innovative forms of collaborative knowledge production: they learn not just about undocumented migrants, but also learn together with them.
This new type of setting not only turns the traditional hierarchical roles of teachers and students upside down, but also challenges the classic compartmentalization of researchers and research subjects, raising question such as: Who is the actual expert on the situation facing undocumented migrants? Is it really the researchers, or aren’t the undocumented migrants themselves much more likely to be the true experts? The “City without Papers” project reexamines common assumptions regarding this subject and fills in current gaps in knowledge through collective research.
The solution
In research-based teaching formats, students actively participate in knowledge production and this way become acquainted with the process of conducting research, from defining the subject of inquiry to publishing the research findings. The active participatory work motivates and empowers students to solve research questions on their own. The “City without Papers” project also pursues this objective.
The collaborative work required a foundation of trust. This involved creating a protected setting in which all parties involved, including the undocumented migrants, openly and candidly discussed issues regarding roles, objectives, interests, and anonymity.
The research collective split up into three mixed groups and carefully examined what undocumented migrants face when searching for housing, managing everyday life, and dealing with legal contradictions. The participants had to get creative to come up with appropriate qualitative methods. Language barriers prevented them from relying exclusively on interviews and surveys. New methods such as multilingual research diaries provided a remedy.
Scientific communication was also part of the module. The students documented parts of their findings in the Züri Urban blog and in an article posted on the online platform Tsüri.
Our teaching community
Collaborative research-based teaching and learning sensitizes students to different views and perspectives and acquaints them with co-production of knowledge. Informal conversations, lunches together, and activities outside the project enabled everyone involved to break down barriers and prejudices and to face each other on an equal footing.
Working together with a vulnerable group of people like undocumented migrants increased the researchers’ awareness of aspects of collaborative teaching research, such as: How big of a security risk is posed by exchanging phone numbers? What IT infrastructure can undocumented migrants access? Does everyone involved have the same understanding of research in mind? And what does it mean to work together fairly and as equals?
Hilbrandt and Ren wrote down their experiences, findings and insights in a toolkit so that interested teaching staff do not have to start from scratch when planning, conducting and evaluating similar collaborative research-based teaching and learning projects. Their toolkit addresses potential difficulties and provides checklists and examples. “Reflection is central to developing teaching further,” Ren explains. “We make our experiences useful for others through the toolkit.”
Project: CoLab – Collaborative Research-Based Teaching and Learning in the City (“City without Papers”), funded by the UZH Teaching Fund’sopen innovation funding line.
Level: Master’s-level methods module for geography students (core elective module)
Project Leaders: Hanna Hilbrandt, Julie Ren
Website: https://www.zueri-urban.com/
Faculty: Faculty of Science, toolkit for all faculties
Unit: Social Geography and Urban Studies
Midnight is fast approaching, and Belinda’s exam is in the morning. She’s still struggling to wrap her head around polymorphism in programming. Perhaps leaving her exam prep to the day before the exam wasn’t the best idea?
The challenge
“We’re seeing more and more students prepare for their exams at very short notice,” says Harald Gall, professor of informatics and dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics (WWF). “But this only results in modest short-term learning success and only rarely leads to a deeper understanding and long-term knowledge.” And yet, it is precisely this type of knowledge deeply rooted in our long-term memory that underpins our ability to think laterally and critically in a given field.
Studies show that learners are better able to link up new insights if they use them regularly and translate them into different formats. But how can instructors motivate their students to engage with teaching materials in an ongoing and effective way? And how can this be achieved in the classroom?
Crowdsourced e-learning
Harald Gall set out to tackle these questions together with postdoc Carol Alexandru. Getting students actively involved can be a challenge, especially in large lectures at the Bachelor’s level. In cooperation with the digital exams and teaching team at the dean’s office and the Department of Informatics, the two researchers have developed a concept that stops two mouths with one morsel, so to speak. Their Crowdsourced Durable E-Learning Tool regularly prompts students to develop possible questions for exercises or exams for the material taught in a course. These questions are then collected and assessed, providing teaching staff with a source of ideas with which to develop practice materials, self-tests and even exams. With the arrival of ChatGPT and open-book online exams, creating good exams has become very time-consuming. “To prevent cheating, you often need 10 different versions of the same question,” says Alexandru. “The pool of questions that we are building with the help of our students is a great help.”
Solutions
The interactive teaching tool that Alexandru is currently developing will be available on the OLAT learning platform. As part of regular weekly tasks, it will ask students to come up with and submit exam questions on the subject they have just covered. Once these potential exam questions have been submitted, the teaching tool will assign 10 of them to the other students on the course, who answer and assess them based on a set of predefined criteria such as quality, difficulty or time required. Machine learning algorithms then filter out similar questions and help correct mistakes.
This gives teaching assistants and instructors a small but high-quality pool of questions that they can use for creating preliminary exams, final exams or new exercises. In other words, this multi-step process whittles down the best questions from a sea of potential exam questions, which teaching staff can then review and use.
Over time, a pool of quality questions will grow – which will benefit instructors and learners alike. The weekly tasks not only help students consolidate what they have learned but also enable them to put together practice tests – in a matter of seconds, even – from a set of questions that they can use to prepare for their exam. The tool will also make it easier for teaching staff to handle repeat examinations and entrance tests for new Master’s students. The vast number of easy-to-generate test variations might also one day make it possible for exams to be held asynchronously and allow students to sit exams in an exam center once they feel they’re sufficiently well prepared.
Our teaching community
Getting students so closely involved in the teaching side of things has several advantages. It motivates them to prepare better for their exams, and to start doing so at an earlier stage. “To be able to develop good questions and get bonus points, learners need to have already read up on the subject and understood the concepts,” says Harald Gall. But this innovative approach also fosters transparency around exams, allowing students to feel more confident and capable of achieving better results.
Other faculties at UZH have also shown an interest in the e-learning tool. It is being tested as part of a pilot project in a number of courses at UZH in 2024 and will be available to teaching staff on OLAT from 2025. Although the courses taught at UZH’s faculties differ in content, the learning methods used are often the same. This allows for methodological teaching tools to be used in a variety of subjects and act as true bridge-builders: “They promote communication and exchange across disciplines,” says Alexandru.
Projects: Crowdsourced e-Assessment for Durable Learning (funded by focus_innovation)
Level: Teaching tool for courses
Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Harald Gall, Dr. Carol Alexandru
Faculty: Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, available to all higher education institutions that use OLAT
The Future of Teaching at UZH Is ...
Maurus found the lecture on production and costs in companies particularly interesting, but the instructor went a bit fast when presenting the different types of costs. So he’s decided to spend this afternoon reviewing the topic in the digital self-study area and testing himself with the virtual flashcards available there.
The challenge
Students differ in terms of their prior knowledge, their interests and their learning speed. While instructors can easily cater to individual requirements in small group lessons, in large lectures it’s more difficult: online learning platforms provide an ideal addition to face-to-face classes, as they enable students to deepen their knowledge individually. However, setting up these digital self-study areas takes a good deal of time and effort and requires a high level of technological savvy alongside teaching expertise. What is the most efficient way for teaching staff to acquire the necessary digital skills?
Making it happen
“By using a digital self-study area for instructors, of course,” thought Consuela Müller, head of the ECON Teaching Center at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics. With support from the Digital Skills for You (DISK4U) program, she developed an online training course which shows instructors how to set up e-learning areas for their students, step by step. Müller drew on her many years of experience: since 2014, she’s been designing the Department of Economics’ e-learning platforms for all compulsory courses at assessment and Bachelor level attended by more than 1,000 students per semester. She still remembers making her first educational video in a quiet little room. Nowadays, her work looks much more professional: with user-friendly interfaces on the OLAT learning platform, interactive videos, innovative learning tools and playful ways of testing one’s knowledge. “It was a steep learning curve for me and my team,” says Müller. She is now making this knowledge available to all UZH teaching staff through the Digital Self-Learning course, which is available for UZH staff free of charge via the OLAT learning platform.
The solution
The course has three modules. First, participants are given an overview of the structure of a learning area and informed about its advantages and limitations. For example, a digital complement to face-to-face teaching only makes sense for recurring courses with more than 50 participants. Based on the learning objectives of their course, instructors select a suitable digital course type and insert the first elements, with the help of illustrated instructions. People with more experience can customize their course design with an HTML template they have written themselves.
The second part of the training is dedicated to the creation of learning videos. “With videos, complex contents can be communicated in an intuitive and easily understood manner,” says Müller. Studies have shown that video formats have a significant influence on learning success. The ECON Teaching Center provides information about which formats are suitable for which learning objectives and how interactive elements encourage active participation.
Müller has compiled her practical experience so that instructors can get started with producing their own videos right away: from the quality of cameras and microphones through editing and publishing to legal issues, she explains everything in detail with pictures, examples and videos. The lists of useful editing software and tutorials, for example for animations, are particularly helpful. The last module is dedicated to testing one’s own knowledge.
Our teaching community
Müller’s project is a good example of the collaborative teaching community at UZH: an experienced digital course developer shares her expertise with fellow teaching staff; their feedback, in turn, helps Müller improve and further develop the program. This dialogue between developers and users is central to building good digital self-learning areas, says Müller. She therefore recommends that instructors always work closely with students in setting up such resources.
Project:Digital Self-Learning
Level: Training for Teaching Staff
Project leader: Consuela Müller
Faculty: Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics; online course available for staff from all faculties
Developed at: ECON Teaching Center
The Future of Teaching at UZH Is ...
In the new Master’s minor program in Digital Skills, launching at UZH in fall 2024, students will not only acquire technical affinity, but will also work with researchers on pressing questions surrounding the digital transformation. This new concept prepares students – and the university itself – to meet the challenges of the future.
After she graduates, biomedical student Feng plans to develop digital healthcare services to close gaps in healthcare provision. She wants to get a head start by using her student years to acquire the technical know-how she’ll need and also get to grips with the ethical and legal aspects of the field.
The challenge
The digital transformation opens up a range of opportunities to approach longstanding problems in a new way; with it, the nature of work is changing radically. For students, this means keeping their digital skills up to date and learning to use new programs and tools is more important than ever. But they must also be able to critically reflect on the consequences of the digital transformation. Good-old social and communication skills are still needed too, and let’s not forget the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams – often the only way to solve the complex challenges of the modern age. How on earth are students supposed to prepare themselves for such a demanding labor market? And how can the university equip them with the necessary practical skills and far-sighted vision?
Making it happen
The Digital Society Initiative (DSI) is a UZH center of competence focusing on the digital transformation of society and academia. It comprises more than 30 professorships, whose teams conduct research into digital change and use findings from basic research to shape future developments in society, culture, politics, the economy and the academy. The DSI also offers courses for students from all faculties who wish to critically examine and actively shape the digital transformation.
In 2024, the DSI launched a unique minor program which aims to meet the needs of students like Feng. The curriculum will be updated each year, ensuring it continues to respond to current developments. As well as learning programming, students taking the minor will put their new skills to use in solving interdisciplinary problems. “This new minor program is not just a mini IT class; it takes a really broad approach,” says curriculum developer Ursula Brack. Students from all faculties can register for the program, which aims to raise participants’ awareness of the ethical, legal and social implications of digital progress through a variety of perspectives and methods. “In this course, transdisciplinarity itself is taught,” says Titus Neupert, co-director of the Digital Society Initiative.
The solutions
Jobs nowadays usually require a combination of hard and soft skills, and the program therefore teaches both across the three module groups: Interdisciplinarity and Digital Transformation; Programming, Machine Learning and AI; and Digital Skills and Tools. When choosing their module combinations, students decide for themselves which skills they want to acquire. The transdisciplinary course “Teamwork on Digital Transformation Challenges” is at the core of the program: here, students get together and combine the experience from their different professional backgrounds with their newly acquired digital skills to jointly develop innovative solutions to real-world challenges.
These challenges are set by UZH researchers and relate to a current issue from their field of research in relation to the digital transformation. The interdisciplinary teams of students choose one of the challenges to work on together. “The great thing is that the course contents are already there in the DSI network. It’s simply a matter of bringing the right people together.”
In the 2023 Fall Semester, Neupert and Brack tested the novel course format with two challenges. In the first, Janna Hastings, professor of medical knowledge and decision support, invited the students to investigate what kind of anatomical errors image-generating AI makes and how to use prompts to minimize these errors. The student researchers then trained an AI model to find out how much it was able to improve itself.
The second challenge, set by Fabian Winiger, a researcher in the area of digital religion, was less solution-focused and more about reflecting on possibilities and consequences. He had noticed how extremely realistic the virtual realities used in shooter video games were and wondered whether VR could be used for other purposes. The students were asked to examine, using a digital-ethnological approach, virtual realities that stimulate empathy, community, admiration or inspiration.
The two researchers acted as supervisors for the student teams as they grappled with the possibilities and limits of digitalization within the scope of each challenge. As they worked on the challenges, the students were always able to call on other experts to run ideas by them or get fresh inputs. “With such close collaborative work, we see that teaching can also be beneficial for research,” says Neupert. The teamwork module also provides impetus for development of the curriculum, as the challenges indicate which digital skills will be relevant for students in the future.
Our teaching community
All the minor program classes and events take place on Mondays at the DSI premises. Neupert and Brack established these regular “Minor Mondays” because they realized the advantages of people being on-site at the same time: coffee breaks and shared lunches lead to informal chats on an equal footing, resulting in closer relationships and greater mutual trust.
The network aspect is probably the most important component of the DSI minor. It is also the first UZH study program to have been created outside of a specific faculty. “For transdisciplinary teaching, everyone is important,” says Brack. Neupert and Brack are therefore developing the minor curriculum together with a Community of Practice (CoP) made up of teaching staff, researchers, students and facilitators – completely without obligation. The DSI regularly invites interested parties to CoP meetings to discuss current developments. The idea of the challenges and the contents of the new introductory module “Digital Transformation – a Scientific Overview” were developed in these brainstorming sessions, for example. “We want to show how valuable it is that we are a comprehensive university – and how innovative we can be when we work together,” says Neupert.
Projects: The DSI Minor Digital Skills is funded mainly by the DIZH. Individual modules are also funded by the ULF program_innovation funding line and the P-8 DISK4U project (swissuniversities).
Level: Master’s level minor program, open to all UZH students
Project leaders: Titus Neupert, Ursula Brack
Website: https://www.dsi.uzh.ch/en/education/digital-skills.html
Designed and implemented by:Digital Society Initiative (DSI)
The Future of Teaching at UZH Is ...
Traveling, customizing one’s studies to one’s career interests, and getting to know different cultures and languages: Francesca, like many other students, is excited by the prospect of an international exchange. She wants to discover Europe and would like to benefit from the expertise of renowned universities.
The challenge
An international education substantially improves students’ career prospects because worldliness and intercultural skills and insight are in demand in the global job market. Multicultural teams at UZH or exchange semesters at foreign universities provide training possibilities to acquire those skills. The University of Zurich is committed to fostering diversity in the UZH community and to promoting student mobility.
Making it happen
University networks are a major driver of innovative, internationally oriented teaching formats. UZH has been a member of Una Europa since 2022. The partner institutions in this leading alliance of European universities work together in the areas of teaching, research and administration, with one of their objectives being to promote student mobility. The alliance enables students at UZH to benefit from courses offered by other Una Europa universities.
One very special program offered is the Bachelor of Arts in European Studies (BAES), which was launched two years ago by eight of the eleven Una Europa universities. UZH will be the ninth university to join in, and preparations for that are currently underway. Starting in 2025, UZH students will thus also be able to pursue the unique joint Bachelor’s degree program. In addition, a joint Bachelor’s degree program in sustainability is planned for 2026.
The solution
The Bachelor of Arts in European Studies program enables students to immerse themselves in European studies for three years at three different universities. The program deals with fundamental aspects and values of European states and societies and teaches students to examine and ponder Europe’s role in the world from multidisciplinary perspectives. “The great thing about the program is that its form reflects its contents,” explains Annika Martin, who is organizing the project on the part of UZH. “The possibility of studying at up to three universities enables participants to experience Europe up-close and intimately.”
BAES students begin their Bachelor’s studies in Leuven, Bologna, Madrid or Kraków, where they complete a three-semester sequence of common core courses and then chose one major and one minor from seven specialized fields of study. The special study tracks are also offered in Paris, Helsinki, Edinburgh and Berlin, as well as in Zurich starting in 2025. Thirty of the 240 Bachelor’s students in total will thus have an opportunity to complete part of the program in European studies at UZH. The participants in the degree program come from all around the world. “That’s both a challenge and an enrichment,” says Peter Finke, the designated director of the study program at UZH.
UZH will initially offer four of the seven specialized fields of study: politics, philosophy, history and law. An additional study track – languages and cultures – is planned for 2026. Finke and Martin are currently putting together the course offerings in consultation with the respective faculties involved. The program draws mainly on existing modules alongside some new courses. With its wide-ranging scope, the joint Bachelor’s program meets the growing demand for flexible, international curriculums. “Students acquire knowledge specifically at universities with the corresponding focus areas,” Martin explains. Taking part in the study program thus also presents UZH with an opportunity to draw international attention to the university’s strengths and to thereby attract talented students. “UZH, for example, possesses a lot of expertise on Europe’s relations with the rest of the world,” Finke says. Democracy, the rule of law, human rights, art and culture – those are all relevant subject areas in the context of European studies, and UZH has a lot to offer in each of them.
Our teaching community
The Una Europa university alliance enables the institutions involved to jointly develop innovative teaching formats and to concertedly rethink university education. Thanks to the collaboration, the Bachelor of Arts in European Studies is able to offer a wide range of pertinent subject areas. “I see incredible potential for teaching, especially in smaller subject areas that a single university alone cannot cover in all of its aspects,” Finke summates.
However, ambitious projects of this kind seldom get by without extra exertion: the Bachelor’s degree program, which is administrated mainly from Belgium, requires a lot of organizational effort: “Reconciling the varying conceptions of the Bologna system and the different academic calendars is very complex by itself,” Martin says. Nevertheless, taking part in the BAES gives UZH an opportunity to actively participate in shaping the future of teaching at the international level.
Project: Una Europa Joint Bachelor of Arts in European Studies
Funded by: UZH Teaching Fund (ULF), global innovation
Level: Degree program
Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Peter Finke, Dr. Annika Martin
Website: https://www.una-europa.eu/study/baes
Faculties: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Faculty of Law.
