With the Bologna process, teaching got a bit more structured than it was before: Students have to sign up for classes, they have to prove they learned something for each course, etc. Even before Bologna, there were occasions when students had to sign up: There were always obligatory seminars with too few places, so you had to put your name on a list (on paper, of course) or be there one hour or more before it started to make sure you could attend this seminar.
Today, we've gotten rid of paper lists and we now have electronic tools where students can "book" classes -- everything has become very service-oriented. However, there are different approaches on how and when to book a class. In Basel and Zurich, booking starts some weeks before the beginning of the semester and ends two or three weeks after the first lesson. It is thus possible for students to step back without any harm after attending a course for some weeks; but within four weeks into teaching, lecturers know who is a regular attendee and who will take part in the exam. So from week 4 on, you can plan actual group work.
In Konstanz, students can attend classes without prior booking -- they have to sign up for the respective ILIAS course, though. They have to sign up for the exam in the middle of the semester and can do so for two or three more weeks. As an instructor, you only get to know who is interested in actually doing the exam when the semester is almost over!
Students have a lot of time deciding if they like your class or not. Which is OK, but has a major drawback: I usually have some group work in my classes which are part of the exam. So if one of the group members decides to not to be interested in this class anymore, the group is shrinking or even reduced to one student. Which makes no sense and we then need to find other solutions for the left over group members.
What is even more annoying: Students often drop out without sending a note to their colleagues or to me. So for some weeks nobody knows whether someone is sick or has left the class.
Most universities also have introduced compulsory attendance, which is a bit strange when you consider that students are grown-ups with a certain interest in the subject. However, you have to count heads every lesson and make sure everyone who should be there actually is there. Students are allowed to skip up to two lessons (out of 14 or 15) without any negative consequences -- if they are seriously sick or have other duties (going to the WK [annual refresher course of the Swiss Army] or participating in an excursion) negotiations will start. However, I always tell students to drop me a short note when they cannot attend a lesson -- it may have an impact on what we do in class. Most of the students send me an e-mail or tell me in person if they cannot come the next week for whatever reason. So this works quite well.
However, some students don't tell you when they cannot show up for the next lesson and they also don't tell if they decided to drop out. In small institutes with only a few instructors and classes each semester, you always see those students again. And it's a bit awkward attending one class but having skipped the other one. At least I would feel a bit awkward, but when I ask students if they had been sick the other day in the other class, I sometimes hear: "Oh, I've decided to drop out, it's too much, I wanted to tell you, really! And, it's not about you, really!"
Maybe I have to change my attitude and see myself as a service provider, not a mentor: Attending a class or not is not about the subject or the instructor, it's just about balancing costs and benefits. And when there's no "contract," there are no commitments, you just leave.
Showing posts with label bologna. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bologna. Show all posts
Friday, March 21, 2014
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Professor for one year (week 37): Winter term break
Some weeks ago, I commented on term dates and my feelings towards winter term. Actually, it's not 4 but 6 weeks of teaching after New Year. This means, the Christmas/New Year break is roughly in the middle of winter term.
I felt uncomfortable with teaching after New Year, but this was mainly due to having still contact with colleagues teaching in Switzerland. I don't feel exhausted the way I usually feel at the end of a semester, i.e., like this owl posted on Facebook some time ago:
In fact, having a break in the middle of the term offers some chances:
I felt uncomfortable with teaching after New Year, but this was mainly due to having still contact with colleagues teaching in Switzerland. I don't feel exhausted the way I usually feel at the end of a semester, i.e., like this owl posted on Facebook some time ago:
In fact, having a break in the middle of the term offers some chances:
- I will start the second part of the term with a repetition/summary. When there's no break, I usually don't do this because I'm hesitant to "lose" a session while there is so much students should get to know/practice.
- Students have a bit more time for "homeworks." And I hope this pays off with respect to quality. Usually, they have two weeks for submitting assignments. I don't include the days of the Christmas/New Year break.
- I have some time to unwind and I hope to be not as exhausted as usually at the end of the term.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Professor for one year (week 24): Teaching load and learning load
Teaching load for lecturers and professors is usually given in hours per semester (German: Semesterwochenstunden = SWS). And of course this differs from country to country and from state to state. Senior researchers with a full-time position in Zurich should teach 4 SWS; full professors at the University of Zurich should teach 6 SWS, in Baden-Württemberg (i.e., Universities of Konstanz, Heidelberg, Stuttgart) teaching load for professors is 9 SWS. A course has a certain number of hours per semester, usually this is the number of hours student spend in class; this is also given in SWS. Depending on this number, a professor in Zurich teaches two to three courses per semester, while a professor in Konstanz teaches three to four courses. That's almost twice as much!
Two of the courses I teach or taught in Konstanz, I already taught in Zurich ("Introduction to Perl for computational linguists" and "Introduction to Prolog for computational linguists"). For the Perl course, students in Zurich would earn 3 credit points, in Konstanz they get 9. In both cases, I taught 2 hours per week in class face-to-face, students then had to do exercises. There was also a tutorial, where students could go to get advice for solving tasks, this was one or two hours. I had/have a teaching assistant for this tutorial hour(s).
According to the Bologna rules as implemented in Switzerland and Germany, 1 ECTS point is equivalent to 25 to 30 hours per week; this "hour" is made of 60 minutes, whereas the hour in "SWS" is made of 45 minutes only. So for 9 ECTS points in a 15-week semester, students should invest 15 to 18 hours (for a 14-week semester, its 16 to 19 hours). If we subtract the face-to-face hours, students have to invest 12 to 15 hours per week working on their own: reading articles, solving tasks, preparing talks, etc.
For a programming course, students should get immediate feedback. Usually, I prepare several tasks per week, students then have to submit their solutions before the next lecture, the teaching assistant helps with assessing these solutions. For the face-to-face time, I have to invest a certain amount of time for preparing slides and example programs; this time is the same, irrespective of the number of ECTS points students get. But it makes a huge difference when preparing tasks, so students spend 15 more hours for 9 credit points or 3 more hours for 3 credit points, and the difference is even bigger with respect to assessing their solutions and giving feedback.
Taking the face-to-face time into account, professors in Konstanz have to invest more time for teaching (including preparing each lecture) than in Zurich, depending on the SWS for each course, it's 1.5 to 2 times more. But considering the number of credit points for each course and taking into account the time needed for preparing appropriate tasks and giving adequate and helpful feedback, it's way more: 3 courses with 2 SWS and 3 to 4 ECTS points each (ca. 6 face-to-face hours and 12 ECTS points in total) vs. 4 courses with 2 to 3 SWS and 9 ECTS points each (ca. 9 face-to-face hours and 35 ECTS points in total).
Teaching load for lecturers and professors should thus be calculated taking both numbers into account: the number of face-to-face hours (i.e., SWS) and the number of credit points students can earn. The ECTS system should not only be used for calculating the amount of work of students but, as this has a direct impact on the workload of instructors, it should also be taken into account for them.
Monday, October 7, 2013
Professor for one year (week 22): Bachelor Thesis
This post is more retrospectively: The week before vacations, I listened to some talks students gave as the last step of their Bachelor (BA) thesis. I had read the theses of the three students I co-supervised and the talks where quite OK: Students could show what they did, how and why, and they answered all questions properly. It was organized a bit like a thesis defense: Supervisors are supposed to ask first and then everybody else can pose a question. The audience is the lecturer responsible for this event, the supervisor(s), and the other BA students who already had presented or will present later. As I understood, there was a course running the whole semester where students discussed how to present their theses.
This "defense" is not part of the official procedure, it doesn't influence the grade. But as supervisor, I liked it a lot -- I could see other students and get to know about the topics they had been working on, and I could very easily test if "my" students really had been working on their topics on their own, and if they really understood what they had written down. I'm not sure if the students liked this part of their BA thesis, but I hope so -- it's the only possibility to tell a bigger audience about the work of the last weeks that had absorbed all your energy. There are only two people who ever read the thesis paper (the supervisors), but here are 10 or 15 people listening to what you discovered and what you think about related work.
The BA is a proper final degree, so students could leave university and start the real life with a real job. Studying linguistics, i.e., something from the humanities, your degree basically says that you learned to read, think, and write. Therefore you should have written a longer text (ca. 50 pages) and spent quite some time researching and thinking. That's what your thesis proofs.
However, not every BA in the humanities requires writing a thesis. At the German Department in Basel, students have to write two term papers (ca. 20 to 25 pages each). Topics could be related, but don't have to. So this is not a "longer text", and students don't invest that much time and energy. I don't consider this a good solution. A the Faculty of Humanities and Arts in Zurich, the first version of the BA regulations had no specific demands with respect to a thesis -- depending on the courses students choose, it was even possible to obtain a BA degree in the humanities without having been writing a single term paper ever. Regulations for seminars afforded getting credits by giving a talk only. They changed this now, but a proper BA thesis would be an even better idea, I suppose.
Of course, in the Swiss Bologna implementation, the MA degree is the "proper final degree." and towards your MA degree, you have to write an MA thesis. But first surveys show that indeed, students leave university after having completed their BA and maybe or maybe not return later for doing an MA. As there is no long final written or oral exam for the BA study as a whole -- students just collect credits during terms -- the BA thesis is the only possibility where students can show that they not only acquired snippets of knowledge and single competencies, but that they are able to combine everything they learned and solve a bigger task -- and write a longish text.
This "defense" is not part of the official procedure, it doesn't influence the grade. But as supervisor, I liked it a lot -- I could see other students and get to know about the topics they had been working on, and I could very easily test if "my" students really had been working on their topics on their own, and if they really understood what they had written down. I'm not sure if the students liked this part of their BA thesis, but I hope so -- it's the only possibility to tell a bigger audience about the work of the last weeks that had absorbed all your energy. There are only two people who ever read the thesis paper (the supervisors), but here are 10 or 15 people listening to what you discovered and what you think about related work.
The BA is a proper final degree, so students could leave university and start the real life with a real job. Studying linguistics, i.e., something from the humanities, your degree basically says that you learned to read, think, and write. Therefore you should have written a longer text (ca. 50 pages) and spent quite some time researching and thinking. That's what your thesis proofs.
However, not every BA in the humanities requires writing a thesis. At the German Department in Basel, students have to write two term papers (ca. 20 to 25 pages each). Topics could be related, but don't have to. So this is not a "longer text", and students don't invest that much time and energy. I don't consider this a good solution. A the Faculty of Humanities and Arts in Zurich, the first version of the BA regulations had no specific demands with respect to a thesis -- depending on the courses students choose, it was even possible to obtain a BA degree in the humanities without having been writing a single term paper ever. Regulations for seminars afforded getting credits by giving a talk only. They changed this now, but a proper BA thesis would be an even better idea, I suppose.
Of course, in the Swiss Bologna implementation, the MA degree is the "proper final degree." and towards your MA degree, you have to write an MA thesis. But first surveys show that indeed, students leave university after having completed their BA and maybe or maybe not return later for doing an MA. As there is no long final written or oral exam for the BA study as a whole -- students just collect credits during terms -- the BA thesis is the only possibility where students can show that they not only acquired snippets of knowledge and single competencies, but that they are able to combine everything they learned and solve a bigger task -- and write a longish text.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Professor for one year (week 13): Teaching since 19 weeks and it goes on and on
Last week was my 19th week of teaching without a break and I have two more weeks to go. How is that possible, as terms in Europe are 14 or 15 weeks?
In February, I started teaching at the University of Basel. Spring term in Switzerland starts mid-February and ends in early June (week 8 to 22). Fall term starts in September and ends the week before Christmas (week 38 to 51). After lectures end there is a three-week period for exams (for Fall term this period starts in the first week of January). This schedule has been in place since 2005. Before that, we had Winter and Summer terms, starting and ending ca. 5 weeks later than today's Fall term and Spring term.
Why did Switzerland change term schedules? Well, that's easy, the Swiss wanted to be "compliant with the European term schedules." And rumor goes that the then Rektor of the University of Zurich (UZH) was the main figure causing this change -- he simply stated that UZH would switch to this schedule anyway, so all the other members of the CRUS (Rectors' Conference of the Swiss Universities) had to follow.
The idea was to have similar times for starting and ending terms, to make it easier for students in Europe to switch universities. Sounds reasonable, right? Except: The surrounding countries still stick to their original term schedules of Summer and Winter terms.
For a lecturer like me, one effect is extreme long teaching periods. When teaching in Basel ended, I had 7 more weeks in Konstanz. And I already feel exhausted, but I still have two more weeks.
For students it means extremely short breaks when coming from a non-Swiss university to a Swiss university, or extremely long breaks when going from a Swiss university to a non-Swiss university -- OK, there are far more worse things than long breaks.
For the scientific community and the role of Swiss universities as conference organizers, the impact is worse: A perfect month for conferences in Europe is September -- everybody had their summer vacation and the next term will start mid October. However, Swiss universities start teaching mid September, making it impossible to find a reasonable large room for a whole day (or even a week!) that is not needed as lecture hall.
In general, I like the concept of Spring and Fall terms better than the Summer and Winter terms -- which is what was in place when I studied. In June and July it can be pretty hot in Europe (and also in Switzerland), so everybody would prefer to be at the lake -- and most of the students (except when forced to attend a lecture) will simply go there. The most annoying term, however, is the Winter term. You have to start teaching (or learning) again after the Christmas/New Year break. It is OK to have exams after New Year, or as lecturer it is OK to assess exams and seminar papers in January. But motivation to teach another 4 weeks after the Christmas/New Year break is really low.
If there is a proper place to call for changing German term schedules, please let me know.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Professor for one year (week 5): A module is a module is a module
At the end of the last century, the Bologna process was started. Studying today is very different from studying some decades ago. New terms and rules were introduced, names of academic degrees were changed, students should be encouraged to spend some time at other universities, etc. When you finish your studies, you will receive a Bachelor's degree after three years. You can then extend your studies by graduating in order to get a Master's degree. And after this you can do a PhD. “Bachelor” and “Master” have replaced the German or Swiss “Vordiplom” or “Zwischenprüfung” and the “Lizentiat,” “Diplom,” and “Magister.”
The Bachelor's degree was also intended to allow students to leave university after only a few years, but with a degree instead of as drop-out students. However, nobody knew whether these new degrees would be accepted by employers. Switzerland therefore decided to have the Master's degree as the regular graduation degree – the Bachelor's degree is only meant as an intermediary degree, but can be useful if students decide to leave university for some years to get practical experience.
One consequence is that there are only loose requirements concerning the Bachelor's degree if you apply for a Master's program in Switzerland – you merely need a “relevant” Master's degree. In some universities you can even start attending Master's courses and earn credit points towards your Master's degree before finishing your Bachelor's studies. I always have students fill out a short survey in the very first lecture; among other things, I ask what they study and in which semester they are. In Basel, some students stated that they are in a Master's program in the 12th semester – which translates to “I have been studying for 12 semesters and I am now doing a Master's program.” It's not the 12th semester of this Master's program. Students see the Bachelor as an intermediary degree. Often you even don't have to write a Bachelor's thesis. Which is really strange for studies in the humanities and arts: You leave university with a degree but you never worked on a longer project or wrote a thesis (i.e., a paper exceeding 20 pages).
In contrast, in Germany the Bachelor's degree is a recognized graduation degree. For entering a Master's program, you need a "good" Bachelor's degree (grade 2.5 or better on a scale from 5 to 1 with 1 being the highest grade), even if this is not a program with restricted admission (numerus clausus). So, only the best students are allowed to pursue their studies. As one consequence, the drop-out rate in German Master's programs is very low.
So, from the administrative perspective, a Bachelor's degree in Germany and in Switzerland means something different.
Another new concept is the “module.” You have to earn a certain amount of credit points in each of the modules that make up your program. The modules appear on your transcript of records. Modularization is intended to make it easier to study some time at another university and to get credit for those courses at your home university. Of course this would mean that modules in Computer Science or Spanish Literature or Theoretical Physics at different universities are comparable or even equivalent in terms of content, achievable competencies, and time and effort.
So far I have taught at the University of Zurich, the University of Basel (both are Swiss Universities), the University of Konstanz (Germany), and I was E-Learning consultant at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland.
At the University of Zurich, a lecture or seminar is equivalent to a module. Modules are defined in study regulations that have to be approved by the Faculty. Which means: it is not that easy to change the title, the credit points, or the scope of a module. If there was a certain course before Bologna, e.g., “Introduction to Programming for Computational Linguists,” this course still exists and is now a module. Module names and lecture names are identical. Some introductury lectures used to span several semesters like “Introduction to Computational Linguistics I” and “Introduction to Computational Linguistics II.” This resulted in the creation of two modules with these names, each containing exact one lecture (and a lab course) of exactly the same name – wouldn't it made have sense to create one module “Introduction to Computational Linguistics” containing two lectures to be attend in two consecutive semesters? Well, apparently they didn't think so in Zurich.
As a consequence, a module is worth 3 to 6 credit points, and you have to do a lot of modules to obtain a degree. From the institutional point of view, this makes it difficult to have courses offered by adjunct lecturers or courses on special topics. How to create a module with a rather vague name or with a title allowing for change? It's also difficult if you would like to allow students to earn credits from small projects as part of research projects, from contributing to publications, or from presenting their projects at workshops or conferences. This shouldn't be mandatory for all students.
At the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, they created a study program from scratch: Modules are intended to enable students to acquire a set of competences. A module may cover several semesters, some modules even run through your entire Bachelor's program. During a semester, students attend certain courses. However, the concept of a course has been redefined: There is no longer one lecturer teaching a whole course over 15 weeks. The lecturer responsible for a module defines learning objectives and an overall theme for a certain course. Then he invites colleagues to contribute to this course by teaching one or two sessions within this course. As a student, you are faced with another lecturer each week; as a lecturer, you teach on your area of expertise in various courses. This concept involves a lot of organisational effort, but I consider it to be a good implementation of the general idea of modules.
At the University of Konstanz, the concept of modules in the Linguistic Department seems to follow the categorization of introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses which would have been named “Proseminar,” “Seminar,” and “Hauptseminar” in the old system. For some modules all courses are mandatory, for most of the modules you have to earn a certain number of credits but you can choose from a range of courses. You only have to pass a small number of modules during your studies. In my surveys, some students thus stated that they are attending my class “to get the last credits needed to pass module 3.” In the advanced modules there is always a course named “Current Topics in X” allowing to allocate invited, one-of courses by experts – for example, I teach “Methods and Applications in Automatic Authoring Support” this semester as an instance of “Current Topics in Speech and Language Processing.” This implementation of Bologna is a little more conservative, but also makes sense. It counters the criticism that university studies are overly regulated, as it allows students to decide on their own which courses they want to take in order to gain the required credits.
Of course, universities should be free to interpret “Bologna.” However, some interpretations make more sense than others. Clearly, having different interpretations of “Bologna” also reduces the interoperability of courses and the mobility of students.
The Bachelor's degree was also intended to allow students to leave university after only a few years, but with a degree instead of as drop-out students. However, nobody knew whether these new degrees would be accepted by employers. Switzerland therefore decided to have the Master's degree as the regular graduation degree – the Bachelor's degree is only meant as an intermediary degree, but can be useful if students decide to leave university for some years to get practical experience.
One consequence is that there are only loose requirements concerning the Bachelor's degree if you apply for a Master's program in Switzerland – you merely need a “relevant” Master's degree. In some universities you can even start attending Master's courses and earn credit points towards your Master's degree before finishing your Bachelor's studies. I always have students fill out a short survey in the very first lecture; among other things, I ask what they study and in which semester they are. In Basel, some students stated that they are in a Master's program in the 12th semester – which translates to “I have been studying for 12 semesters and I am now doing a Master's program.” It's not the 12th semester of this Master's program. Students see the Bachelor as an intermediary degree. Often you even don't have to write a Bachelor's thesis. Which is really strange for studies in the humanities and arts: You leave university with a degree but you never worked on a longer project or wrote a thesis (i.e., a paper exceeding 20 pages).
In contrast, in Germany the Bachelor's degree is a recognized graduation degree. For entering a Master's program, you need a "good" Bachelor's degree (grade 2.5 or better on a scale from 5 to 1 with 1 being the highest grade), even if this is not a program with restricted admission (numerus clausus). So, only the best students are allowed to pursue their studies. As one consequence, the drop-out rate in German Master's programs is very low.
So, from the administrative perspective, a Bachelor's degree in Germany and in Switzerland means something different.
Another new concept is the “module.” You have to earn a certain amount of credit points in each of the modules that make up your program. The modules appear on your transcript of records. Modularization is intended to make it easier to study some time at another university and to get credit for those courses at your home university. Of course this would mean that modules in Computer Science or Spanish Literature or Theoretical Physics at different universities are comparable or even equivalent in terms of content, achievable competencies, and time and effort.
So far I have taught at the University of Zurich, the University of Basel (both are Swiss Universities), the University of Konstanz (Germany), and I was E-Learning consultant at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland.
At the University of Zurich, a lecture or seminar is equivalent to a module. Modules are defined in study regulations that have to be approved by the Faculty. Which means: it is not that easy to change the title, the credit points, or the scope of a module. If there was a certain course before Bologna, e.g., “Introduction to Programming for Computational Linguists,” this course still exists and is now a module. Module names and lecture names are identical. Some introductury lectures used to span several semesters like “Introduction to Computational Linguistics I” and “Introduction to Computational Linguistics II.” This resulted in the creation of two modules with these names, each containing exact one lecture (and a lab course) of exactly the same name – wouldn't it made have sense to create one module “Introduction to Computational Linguistics” containing two lectures to be attend in two consecutive semesters? Well, apparently they didn't think so in Zurich.
As a consequence, a module is worth 3 to 6 credit points, and you have to do a lot of modules to obtain a degree. From the institutional point of view, this makes it difficult to have courses offered by adjunct lecturers or courses on special topics. How to create a module with a rather vague name or with a title allowing for change? It's also difficult if you would like to allow students to earn credits from small projects as part of research projects, from contributing to publications, or from presenting their projects at workshops or conferences. This shouldn't be mandatory for all students.
At the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, they created a study program from scratch: Modules are intended to enable students to acquire a set of competences. A module may cover several semesters, some modules even run through your entire Bachelor's program. During a semester, students attend certain courses. However, the concept of a course has been redefined: There is no longer one lecturer teaching a whole course over 15 weeks. The lecturer responsible for a module defines learning objectives and an overall theme for a certain course. Then he invites colleagues to contribute to this course by teaching one or two sessions within this course. As a student, you are faced with another lecturer each week; as a lecturer, you teach on your area of expertise in various courses. This concept involves a lot of organisational effort, but I consider it to be a good implementation of the general idea of modules.
At the University of Konstanz, the concept of modules in the Linguistic Department seems to follow the categorization of introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses which would have been named “Proseminar,” “Seminar,” and “Hauptseminar” in the old system. For some modules all courses are mandatory, for most of the modules you have to earn a certain number of credits but you can choose from a range of courses. You only have to pass a small number of modules during your studies. In my surveys, some students thus stated that they are attending my class “to get the last credits needed to pass module 3.” In the advanced modules there is always a course named “Current Topics in X” allowing to allocate invited, one-of courses by experts – for example, I teach “Methods and Applications in Automatic Authoring Support” this semester as an instance of “Current Topics in Speech and Language Processing.” This implementation of Bologna is a little more conservative, but also makes sense. It counters the criticism that university studies are overly regulated, as it allows students to decide on their own which courses they want to take in order to gain the required credits.
Of course, universities should be free to interpret “Bologna.” However, some interpretations make more sense than others. Clearly, having different interpretations of “Bologna” also reduces the interoperability of courses and the mobility of students.
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