Professor for one year (week 48): Who does profit from MOOCs?

Actually, this blog post was scheduled for the first week of March. However, the topic is still relevant even a few weeks later. Just pretend it's early March 2014 (i.e., cold and rainy) while reading.

During our visit of US higher ed institutions last year, we met James P. Honan from Harvard's Grad School of Education. We discussed various things and also touched e-learning and MOOCs. Honan told us about his experiences as a teacher and consumer of e-learning courses and contents and then some musing started about the underlying principles of MOOCs. I will briefly follow up here.

From a didactically point of view, massive open online courses (MOOCs) are old wine in new skins. I wrote about this part in an earlier post. E-Learning courses hosted on servers of universities started around 2000, and courses supported by current technology are as old as TV. The only new aspect is the "massiveness". At a university, e-learning courses are offered to the students of a particular subject at a certain point of their studies enrolled at that specific university. So there might be several hundreds of students using the materials of a course.

Going "massive" and "open", those courses skip restrictions -- everybody can take part -- but no change in didactics might be involved. Allowing more than only a few hundred users to access the material may involve changes in server architecture, maybe clustering, but not necessarily in the general technology used for user interaction and the like.

However, someone has to run those servers and someone should be paid for maintenance. The first MOOCs were developed from scratch, not just scaled e-learning courses (there will be another post on this aspect, stay tuned) -- maybe the content providers would need some payment, too. But declaring those courses as "open" doesn't only mean everybody may join, but also means nobody should pay anything for taking part. So where should the money come from to pay development and maintenance?

Honan gave a hint when he told about the fear of teaching staff at universities: Attending a course may have two main reasons. People just are curious about a certain topic (a), or people have to acquire certain knowledge (due to job demands or the like) and that involves getting a certificate (b). For a certificate, attendees would have to do some sort of exam. And this exam would have to be assessed and graded by someone. And guess who is qualified for assessing and grading student work? Right, teaching staff.

So while in the early years of e-learning instructors feared to be replaced by machines, the advent of MOOCs makes instructors fear to be used for grading only. And in the end, to be replaced by cheap grading staff -- why should you need highly qualified academics when you can have people trained to grade certain exams only. MOOCs would not result in replacing humans, but in downgrading educators.

At the one hand, this nightmare might not become true to the extend instructors might expect -- similar to the fear of teachers being replaced be educational TV shows or e-learning courses --, but on the other hand, that's probably part of the business model of companies like Coursera, edX, or Udacity. Participation in MOOCs might be free, but to get a certificate you would have to pay -- part of this money might get down to the graders, but most of it will go to the company owners. Those certificates don't have to cost a fortune. Look at prices for apps -- as long as the audience is big enough, small fees are fine.

Of course, with "certificate" a mean any piece of paper stating that you passed the exam of this course. As soon as participants actively demand official certificates of the hosting institutions, e.g., from Stanford or the MIT, another question arises: How much is such a certificate worth? As an on-campus student, you would have to pay a lot of money -- if you would ever get accepted in the first place. However, nobody would pay several thousand dollars for an on-line course offered or developed by Stanford or MIT staff.

So maybe several hundred dollars? But wouldn't that be a hard competition for those Ivy League Universities? If I could get a prestigious certificate without moving to Stanford and without enormous debts, why should I even send an application to Stanford? But here we're already touching another topic.

Professor for one year (week 47): Teaching investment and payoff

This is the 47th post in the series "Professor for one Year."  Initially, I had planned to post something every week.  However, my year is over and I still have some weeks left in the series.  The topics for the missing posts are already planned, so the only thing I need is some time to write ...

Apropos of time:  How much time do you spend on teaching, including preparation, interacting with students, assessment, grading?  As I wrote two weeks ago and also in week 24, teaching did take up a lot of my time.  I argued that the time allocated to teaching -- including preparation and grading -- should be the same as the time students have to invest to take a particular class -- i.e., the ECTS credits should describe the amount of work students and instructors have to invest.  However, for a regular seminar with 9 ECTS credits, this would mean 18 hours per semester week.  So, no more than three courses (54 hours per week) and then you would have to do some of the other work in the non-lecture time aka semester break to stay at least somewhat healthy and within the regulatory framework of labor law (41 hours per week).

Let's have a look at the workload of professors; 39 to 41 hours per week include:

• administrative work (keeping track of all the different contracts for your PhD students and PostDocs, help with finding new researchers, mentoring your PhD students, hold staff meetings, etc.)
• committee activities at your local university (attend faculty meetings, serve on appointment committees, attend senate meetings, etc.)
• committee activities in your scientific community (attend meetings of societies, have some duties there, review for conferences and workshops, review for funding agencies, etc.)
• write grant proposals (you don't get much state or university money for staff)
• teaching
• doing research
• publish about research

There are studies on professoral activities, showing that professors work more than the 40 hours they get paid for, and that they spend only little time on activities one would usually associate with "being a professor" -- teaching and doing research.

Having a social live, too, and assuming that maybe you don't want to work every weekend, but roughly 50 hours per week -- of course, you think about some issues during your non-working time and you have ideas outside you office --, the question remains: which of the activities are really important and where could you spend less time?  You cannot cut on administrative work, but you could try to delegate some tasks.  Most of the committee activities at your university are related to the status of a professor, so no chance of delegating something there.  You can delegate tasks for your scientific community like reviewing conference or workshop papers -- however, as an author, you'd rather want to get feedback from senior researchers, not from PhD students, so this is a bit tricky.  You could hire someone for writing grant proposals and you could even let your PhD students and PostDocs write most of the articles on which you appear as co-author.  Even the research you could delegate to members of your group, at least part of it.  So you are the one who has ideas and then somebody else is experimenting if they are worth to be investigated much deeper -- for computational linguistics, this means that you find someone who does the programming along the lines of your roughly sketched new approach.  So most of the activities could be delegated to other people, and maybe the quality even improves because you profit from including more people and thus more ideas and more skills than one could have oneself.

And for teaching?  Oh, that's easy: You take the slides and exercises you developed years ago (or you even borrowed from somebody) and use them term after term without changes.  You find teaching assistants doing all the tutoring and exercises with students.  You cut short on mentoring: students have to come up with topics for theses themselves, and somehow they should know by then how to write a thesis, don't they?  This way, you can drastically reduce the time spent on teaching.  And to be honest, that's the most obvious way:  I didn't have duties in committees at the university during my year as professor, but even then, I could hardly keep up with my scientific community activities, and I did have absolutely no time to write grant proposals, do research, or even publish.  In other words: I had to invest almost all of my time in teaching and I definitely couldn't afford this for a real professorship.  On the positive side, I now have quite a teaching record, from which I can benefit in the future.  But honestly, I also enjoyed mentoring and advising students even though this takes up a lot of time.  And in the end it's the only way to have someone try an idea and report some results I might be able to use for proposals or further research (eventually resulting in publications, too).

However, having a teaching load as high as 9 SWS must result in reduced teaching effort, and thus in  lower-quality teaching as professors cannot afford investing most of their working hours in teaching. So one solution would be to value teaching more, or to reduce teaching load -- students then could expect good-quality teaching and mentoring.

Professor for one year (week 45): Last week of teaching

Finally it's mid February and the last week of teaching is over.  This semester (Winter term 2013/2014), I taught four courses: on Computational Morphology aka XFST, on Computational Semantics aka Prolog, on Natural Language Processing, and on logging writing processes and exploring those data.

Except for the NLP course, I had to prepare everything from scratch.  There was material I could use and it definitely helped to "borrow" ideas and exercises for the two programming courses, but I spent all time with preparing slides (for all courses) and data (especially for the writing processes course) or assessing student solutions.

I also realized that I have to work on my elocution: When I teach two classes back-to-back, my voice is almost gone at the end of the day although I regularly sip some water.  Of course, one solution would be not to talk that much myself, but to let students contribute more.  However, staying focused for 90 minutes and trying to be louder than the 30 computers plus keyboarding noise and to keep students awake is stress to my voice.

As for the exams, I did different things:

• For the Prolog course, I had an exam similar to the Perl course last semester.  The grade is made up by points earned during the semester by submitting solutions for three exercises and then there is a final exam consisting of a more theoretical part to be answered on paper and a more practical part where students actually program.  I could assess the theoretical part while students worked on the programming tasks, nice multitasking.
• For the XFST course, students earned some points by solving three assignments during the semester, too.  And then they will submit small projects including documentation within 4 weeks.
• For the NLP course, students earned some points during the semester by submitting solutions for three assignments and then I had a classic written exam at the very last session.  Students had to answer one question per topic.  Looks like the handwriting of most students is more or less readable.
• For the writing process course, students had to work on a project during the second half of the semester.  They defined a small research question to investigate in groups of two, recorded a writing session for each person, and then explored the logged data and wrote a small report.  I will report on this experimental didactic setting at the next Conference on Writing Research in August. 

I could time the assessments for the three NLP-related courses so I had to come up with an assignment every week and I had to grade an assignment every week.  I preferred a constant but moderate workload instead of giving assignments to all three courses in the same week.  In every course, students had to read research papers (classics and recent ones) in groups and present the content to their colleagues.  Students also had to relate the paper they presented to the material presented or discussed before and they had to comment on whether or not they agree with the authors based on their prior knowledge and being almost full-fledged and approved linguists themselves (they where all master students except for the XFST course).

So teaching is over, I wait for the project submissions of two courses and I have to assess the written exam for NLP and the Prolog programs.  I hope to submit all grades by the end of March to actually finish all teaching stuff when my appointment in Konstanz ends.

Professor for one year (week 41): What's in your syllabus?

It's evaluation time again and one of my students wrote in the free form field "What else would you like to comment on":  "I don't know the learning objectives.  I searched the slides and didn't find anything."

I was offended: Why didn't she (it's a girls-only class) ask?  Of course it is in the short description of the class in the Learning Management System (we use ILIAS).  Of course it is in the short description of the class which instructors have to provide to be listed in the study management system where you find schedules, instructor information, etc.  Of course it is on the slides for the very first session -- I always have a proper slide titled "Learning objectives."

But somehow, she had missed the information.  So maybe one slide, five bullet points, or two paragraphs are not enough.

In the study management system, it looks like this:

You find all relevant information, it looks a bit structured, but no explicit learning objectives are given.  They are somehow hidden in the description field.  Instructors are asked to provide certain information (language of the course, material used, kind of exams), but they are not explicitly asked to provide learning objectives.  Maybe there should be even an extra field.

When I realized that other information is missing, too, I looked around how other instructors write a syllabus.  As a case in point I looked for writing related courses and found these:

• EngLit 2570: Materialities of Writing by Annette Vee (Spring 2014)
• English 353: Technical Editing by Cheryl E. Ball (Spring 2012)
• E501: Theories of Composition by Carrie A. Lamanna (fall 2013)

All of them have extensive descriptions on what the course is about, what students will do, what's the motivation behind this course, comments on literature or other material used, etc.  Carrie Lamanna and Cheryl Ball have long explanations about the assignments: What do students have to do, how will the assignments be graded, and how do single assignments contribute to the final grade.  I do communicate these information, too, but I rather announce it in class and don't write it down to be read before the course starts.

Additionally, you can read the instructions for each assignment.   I only have this when I hand out the assignment.  As I found the syllabi after the courses had taken place, I cannot say if the assignments had been published before the courses started or if they had been added once at a time.

Of course it's great to find these sources and be able to use them as inspiration for your own course, but on the other hand, it means you cannot re-use those material for the next course (when I teach a similar course at another university, I often re-use assignments as there is only very little chance that students from university A have friends at university B who took my course).  And the instructors probably didn't use an LMS -- I don't think you put everything in your LMS and have an elaborate website.

If all material had been set up before the course start, this means a lot of preparation effort.  There are lists on which papers to read for which session, sometimes with comments even.  Although I have a schedule concerning which topic to cover in which session, I often search for papers one or two weeks before a particular session.  Maybe I should think about this and really invest a reasonable amount of time in proper preparation for the next classes.  Of course it helps if you teach a course for the second, third, etc. time -- you only have to look for new papers for a certain topic, but you already have all canonical material and you know how to proceed and what works in class.

What I really would like to adopt is the kind of course policy Cheryl Ball has in her syllabus.  It's an explicit list of what students can expect from this class and the instructor, and a very clear statement of what the instructor expects from the students to make this course a success for both parties.

I especially like her comments on grades: "Everyone in this class starts with a B/C.  How you participate changes that grade higher or lower."  And then follow a lot of actions influencing the grade positively or negatively.  For programming courses, when you actually can check student answers against a sample solution, grading might be a bit easier and more formally.  But in courses where there is no single right answer for an assignment, grading is much harder and usually students try to argue about grades.  So a policy on what influences the grade in a positive or negative way is really helpful -- and there should be no room for discussion left.  Everybody knows the consequences of their actions in class.

So I hope to have enough time before the next teaching appointment to spend more time for preparation and start actual teaching a bit more relaxed.

Professor for one year (week 40): How to drop out

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.

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 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.

However, it still feels odd that the week after Winter term in Konstanz ends, Spring term in Switzerland starts. So I'm very happy to have no teaching appointment in Switzerland for Spring.

Professor for one year (week 35): Should everybody know how to program?

This post is the report, I wrote for the GPP 2013.

Introduction

Being a computational linguist, I was trained in programming as well as in linguistics.  After school in the mid-nineties, I couldn't decide whether to focus on linguistics (or nowadays "humanities") or computer science/math (or nowadays "STEM").  So I was quite happy to be able to focus on both when studying computational linguistics.  I always loved algorithms, abstraction -- and yes, I also loved Latin.  Maybe that's a rare combination, but in today's world it turns out to be quite handy.

One aspect of the 2013 GPP motto "University and Society -- Meeting Expectations?" is the aspect of university as the institution to prepare students to be successfull in today's society.  In the last decade, we saw the emergence of more and more electronic devices, "digital" is one of the buzzwords in several scientific fields, technology becomes pervasive.  We speak of the "Generation Y" as being "digital natives."  However, if we look how today's students use technology, they are only users, they are not creators.  They often even don't know how to configure programs.

Douglas Rushkoff in his book Program or be Programmed argues that everybody should know how to program to understand today's technology and to be able to control it instead of becoming a slave of the electronic devices surrounding us.  So my personal focus in the GPP 2013 was to explore how universities support or enable learning to program.  Of course students in computer science (CS) and related fields (like computational linguistics) are trained in programming, but I was interested in courses for non-CS students.

Answers from US professors

During our visit in the US, I asked my question at two places explicitely and I got two different answers. 

At North Eastern University, Dr. Neenah Estrella-Luna, an assistant academic specialist,  as she described herself, argued that indeed, computer literacy would be a valuable topic to teach considering that university should empower students to deal with current challenges.  However, she admitted that there are no courses offered to all students, not to mention being required.  My question was understood as asking about "teaching students how to program." 

At swissnex in Boston, we met Dr. James Honan, senior lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  He understood my question differently and answered that students would keep faculty busy and push them to use more technology.  He talked about MOOCs before and probably this influenced his answer.  However, his statement made clear that there is a view of "computer literacy" as "being able to use devices", including the expectation that instructors offer digital content and e-learning material.

At this moment, I was a bit disappointed.  Either the necessity of teaching and learning how to program is not recognized, or, when it is recognized, it is impossible to offer such courses for all students.

While at the MIT, we visited the Media Lab and the "Lifelong Kindergarten" headed by Professor Mitchel Resnick.  We got an introduction into scratch, the programming language and online community intended to teach kids how to program using a game concept.  They learn abstraction, algorithmics, and data structures while they play with code snippets, interact with other kids around the world, and program their own games and worlds.  It's an advanced model of learning the concept of recursion while playing "Towers of Hanoi."  I was aware of scratch before and I really enjoyed seeing some demos and talking to the researchers involved in designing and implementing scratch.  I think using games as a vehicle for teaching important concepts is a good strategy -- the users aren't probably not even aware that they acquire valuable knowledge they will use later in school, in university, and in their jobs.

Situation in Switzerland

On the morning of the day I took my flight to Boston, I took part in a meeting of an experts panel on CS competencies of the Hasler Foundation in Berne.  The foundation is working towards a proposal for a general subject "Computer Science" at Swiss schools.  Currently, some schools in some cantons offer CS as supplementary subject (in German: Ergänzungsfach).  However, this subject is often taught as it was in the 1990s: students learn how to use certain software, they don't learn to program, they don't learn about abstraction, algorithms, and data structures.  In the publication "informatik@gymnasium", published by the Hasler foundation through NZZ Libro (note that the German version of this book is already sold out!), the authors argue that CS and using software are two differnt things and that school should teach students the basics of CS to prepare future citizens to cope with everyday life.  It is probably a long way to achieve this goal, but it's a goal worth all the effort.

However, here we talk about serious teaching, not about fun instruction as in the case of scratch.

Answers from the Web

After coming home, I searched the web for comments about computer literacy and opinions or activities on teaching programming.  Bill Gates, in a questions session at Microsoft's Faculty Summit, confirmed that there is indeed a "gap between how computer scientists use computers to automate their lives and how most people don't really know how to use them effectively."

Larry Hardesty talks about the "programmable world" that surrounds us and that will change the world as we know it by making the distinctions between virtual and physical objects obsolete.  To make good use of the new world, we should be able to understand opportunities and challenges (and issues) and how to manage them.

In England, efforts are on their way to teach algortithms to primary school kids.  The government acknowledges the need to "catch up with the world's best education systems."  However, this new curriculum is still under development and the teacher's union isn't sure about when would be a good starting point to introduce it -- they object to only react to governmental decisions.  According to Sean Coughlan it will include computing defined as:

Computing will teach pupils how to write code. Pupils aged five to seven will be expected to "understand what algorithms are" and to "create and debug simple programs". By the age of 11, pupils will have to "design, use and evaluate computational abstractions that model the state and behaviour of real-world problems and physical systems".

It would be great if England could manage to design and actually implement this aspect.

And there are discussions going on in the emerging field of "Digital Humanities": In a twitter post, Jan Hecker-Stampehl (@heckerstampehl) asks "Should humanities scholars learn to program or trust that the programmers in DH projects will understand them?", obviously not aware of the more than 30-year old answer, Jacques Froger gave 1970 (Froger, J. (1970). La critique des textes et l'ordinateur. Vigiliae Christianae 24 (3), 210-217.), as Michael Piotrowski responds:

Il n'est pas indispensable que le philologue établisse lui-même le programme, encore que ce soit infiniment souhaitable ; il devrait au moins connaître assez le langage de programmation pour contrôler le travail du technicien ; en effet, l'expérience m'a appris qu'il ne faut pas s'en remettre les yeux fermés aux électroniciens, mal préparés par leur formation mathématique à se faire une idée juste de problèmes concrets qui se posent dans la domaine de la philologie.

(English: It is not absolutely necessary that the philologist writes the program himself, even though it would be extremely desirable; but he must at least know the programming language, so that he is able to check the work of the technician; in fact, experience has taught me that one should not blindly rely on the electronics people, whose mathematical training has hardly prepared them for fully understanding the concrete problems encountered in the domain of philology. (translation by Piotrowski))

However, even in fields where you would expect learning to program to be part of the curriculum, it is rather rare, as the blog post by Philip Guo shows.  He argues: "If you're a scientist or engineer, programming can enable you to work 10 to 100 times faster and to come up with more creative solutions than your colleagues who don't know how to program."  Students would need more concrete motivation than only arguing that programming helps them become an empowered citizen (the argument Estrella-Luna used at North Eastern).  Guo accepts that programming tools, i.e., text editors, should be improved to foster programming, but in the meantime we should focus on teaching students programming skills to support creative problem solving.

Selena Larson emphasizes the need to teach programming to students in schools already.  She supports the Hour of Code initiative during Computer Education Week 2013, following a similar strategy as scratch: Using games and fun figures, kids should understand basic principles and get an idea about what it means to program.

Conclusion

Studies by professional assocations like the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) regularly show an increasing number of jobs requiring programming knowledge.  They also show that there is a lack of people with appropriate skills meeting these requirements.  So there is an urgent need in society. 

As I agree that school would be an appropriate place to start teaching basic concepts of CS, university should be the place to empower students to actually program.  Maybe learning to program, acquiring knowledge about algorithms and data structures should be a required course in every curriculum.  I strongly support the statement made by Steve Jobs in an interview in 1995 saying "It teaches you how to think.  I view computer science as a liberal art.  It should be something that everybody learns."

However, we are still on the way to implementing those ideas into education, be it in school or at university.  If we have the chance to support initiatives like the Hour of Code or panels and experts groups designing curricula, those of us having the respective knowledge, should take part and see this as opportunity to serve society.

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.

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.

Professor for one year (week 15): Exams and why to prefer computer-based ones

Finally, last week was the last week of teaching.  In the seminars and lectures, we summarized the topics of the classes and tried to understand what the things learned could be used for in the future.  And for the Perl course, there was the final exam.

With Bologna, students get credits for every course they attend.  And to give credits, lecturers have to assess students' achievements.  To make this sound not as scary as "exams", Switzerland uses "Leistungsnachweis" (evidence of academic achievement) instead of "Prüfung" (exam), however, in Germany these things are still called exams.

To assess students' achievements, one can use a variety of tasks: the more traditional ones like oral exams, seminar papers, presentations, written exams; more modern ones like multiple-choice tests as a form of easy-to-assess written exams; or sophisticated ones like e-portfolios.  To choose an appropriate form of assessment, lecturers should consider the topic of the course -- there is no sense in writing a seminar paper when students should learn how to microscope or how to program.  The exam should be a task similar to the ones students had to solve during the course.  The lecturer should assess the knowledge and the skills student had to acquire during the semester. 

So for the programming course, students learned the basics of Perl and they had to program a lot.  As computational linguist, Perl is a perfect language for preprocessing data you would like to analyze or for extracting information from analyses.  So that's what we did during the course: opening and reading files, extracting words and sentences to count and order them, cleaning HTML files, printing to files, etc.  Students had to solve assignments during the term, making up 40% of the overall grade.  They could use whatever help they could find -- and it's pretty easy to detect copy-paste solutions from Google, just ask students to explain their submitted code in front of the others.

For over 10 years now, I conduct the exams for programming courses on the computer.  This way, the exam is very much like an assignment they had to solve the weeks before.  And students can test their code before submitting -- I don't assess code that is not running.  When I studied, I had to program on paper for exams, and when I came to the University of Zurich in 2001, this was still the case for the programming courses at the Department of Informatics.  However, in real live, you will never ever program on paper, so there is no sense in having an exam like this.

For the Perl course, students found two input files in a folder on the Learning Management System (LMS) and they had to submit their solution to this folder.  Using an LMS during the exam means: There is an Internet connection.  This means: You can google a lot!  But usually this doesn't help unless you have understood the task at hand to reformulate it yourself.  And in this case, you are almost certainly able to solve it without help -- except for looking up which bracket has to go where.

The results for the assignments during the semester haven't been too bad, although students reported that they had spent a lot of time for solving -- which was intended, you have to spend around 20 hours a week to really earn those 9 ECTS points.

For all programming exams, I have a more theoretical (or knowledge) part and a more practical part.  The theoretical part is easy to answer if students get aware that I start each lesson with a short recap of the lesson before -- the questions just come from these parts.  There seems to be a strong correlation between gender and success rate in the theoretical and practical parts: Women profit from having memorized for the theoretical part, men profit from having stamina and finding creative workarounds for the practical part.  Yes, programming is a lot about failure, and you have to practice a lot to feel comfortable with a new language.  To learn programming is a lot about to learn from your own errors and to learn not to give up, but try again and find a solution for the given task -- there is always more than one solution.  I'm not sure if this really correlates with gender or rather with being more a linguist or a programmer -- preferring humanities or engineering -- but as a computational linguist, you are both, so you have to build stamina to get this code running and providing you the information you need.

For the theoretical part, I prohibited the use of the computer -- that would have been too easy -- and students had to answer some questions on paper.  And there I understood why paper-based exams are really bad.  I had prepared sheets of paper with the questions (printed in 12-point font size) and enough space to write the answers.  Students wrote in even bigger font size, so the space was big enough, indeed.  12-point font is fairly readable. However, students almost wrote with their nose!  They bent to the table creating terrible hunchbacks -- it would have been a good demonstration for physiotherapist, I almost felt back pain myself.  For the practical part, however, everybody set straight, looked at the screen and sometimes at the keyboard and the paper with the task.  A much healthier impression. 

Isn't this a strong argument to abandon handwritten exams at all?  And for the final exams towards your BA or MA degree, you have to write 4 or more hours by hand.  Not to mention the poor examiner who has to read handwritten essays produced under stress by unaccustomed writers (when was the last time you wrote more than one page by hand?) -- it looks like a mess, the writing gets poorer towards the end and every page is sprinkled with revisions and annotations pointing to extra sheets, etc.

Oh, and I would love the integration of interactive checkers into an LMS.  Students get feedback from the programming environment on syntax errors and static semantic errors, but interactive checkers would also give feedback on semantic issues, thus facilitating the learning process for students as well as the assessing process for lecturers.  Combined with automatically assessible multiple-choice, short-answer, or sentence completion tests (yes, you can assess all levels of knowledge and skills with appropriate use of those tests, too), I would be freed from grading.

Professor for one year (week 14): Consultation-hours

When you teach and supervise student projects, students sometimes want to discuss something.  They come to your consultation-hours.

If you don't have a walk-in policy, because you don't want to be interrupted constantly, you have a dedicated time when students can come to your office.  I offer consultation two hours a week on Tuesdays.  However, sometimes nobody will show up, sometimes five students are waiting in line.  So some consultation management is needed.

The traditional way is to use a sheet of paper.  You print a list (or draw one by hand) with consultation slots and pin it to your door.  Students have to sign up for a slot beforehand and then they can come for consultation.  However, this means you have to remember to pin a new sheet of paper each week (or you need a secretary for this task), and students have to come by twice.  Sometimes they even have to stop by your office more often in case all slots for this week have been filled already.  This is very inconvenient, especially when your office is on a floor no student comes by regularly.  I also don't think it is a good idea that everybody can see who is coming when for consultation -- sometimes students even have to write the topic they want discuss.  And I don't want to pin paper to my door -- it's ugly and there are fire authority regulations.

For some time now, I have been looking for an electronic solution.  I have only a few requirements:

1. I want to set up all the slots at once with as least effort as possible.
2. Students should sign up some days in advance -- I prefer to plan my days and maybe skip the consultation-hours completely if nobody will come.  So no surprises an hour before, please.
3. I want to be notified who is coming when.
4. No costs.
5. Oh, and I just want to have this tool only, no fancy add-ons.  No need to create a bigger structure.

I thought about using Doodle, but this would not meet the requirement #1, and also for requirement #2 it would not work.  Of course your LMS (learning management system) or your university's CMS (content management system) would be the perfect plase for a tool like this.  However, they usually don't offer this kind of functionality. 

The University of Konstanz uses ILIAS, and you can have a personal calender -- as for most LMS.  This calender also has a "Consultation hours" functionality.  Perfect!  And you can integrate this calendar into all your courses.  Even better!

But then it doesn't meet requirement #5.  Of course, it is nice to have this calender in all the courses I use for lectures.  But some students I supervise do not attend any of my courses.  So they cannot access this calendar.  Unless I create another course with this calendar only -- no, wait, I have to ask someone to create such a course, I cannot do this myself because of the right managament.  There is no structure element in ILIAS where students could access calendars for consultation-hours of lecturers.  They have to sign up for a specific course first and then they can access this calendar and book a consultation appointment.

So in the end, I do have a sheet of paper pinned to my office door -- a description on how to sign up for consultation.  At least I don't have to remember to print a new one each week.

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.

Professor for one year (week 9): Lots of trouble

Last week was a busy week.  I spent two days with the GPP13 participants in Riva San Vitale (TI) with lots of discussions and interaction.  Students at the University of Konstanz had to solve assignments on their own in the computer lab.

Before I started the trip to Riva, I got a message that over the weekend somebody committed burglary at the university.  They stole some items from the athletics office.  This office has a connecting door to our computer lab.  And there we had a dozen iMacs and a dozen MacMinis.  All of the Minis have been stolen!

Now this has various impacts:  Most obviously, my colleagues have to deal with the police and probably with the insurance company.  Then we have to by new computers and set them up.  For the moment, the technician is busy with configuring old iMacs to make sure teaching can go on.  I don't know yet how I will conduct the computer-based exam at the end of July.

Not so obvious are some other effects:  The lab is a bunch of stand-alone computers, you start the computer and then log in using a local account.  There is no connection to any net-based disk space.  Everything is stored locally.  That means that everything students had stored on the MacMinis (e.g., programs and notes) is lost.  Some students already had started to work on projects; unless they had stored these data on a private device, this work is lost, too.

So it is always a good idea to have backups on a local device or to send everything to yourself via e-mail.  But of course it would be even better to offer access to net-based disk space.  When you log in, you connect to your university account and you can store everything there.  This also means that you always use your personal account, not a local one.  That's the way computer labs at the University of Zurich work.  So students don't have to remember which computer they worked with during the last lecture and they can access their data from everywhere.  Also OLAT, the LMS used in Zurich provides some personal storing space; students can use this to store data they want to access from different locations or they want to share with student fellows for project work or the like.  Unfortunately, ILIAS (the LMS used in Konstanz) does not offer this.

When I was just recovering from the burglary message, I got another message basically asking, if I was aware that next semester I would not teach the courses I offered to teach some days before -- instead of a research colloquium, I'm supposed to offer a seminar for students enrolled in teacher training for German.  Aha!

This week is a "normal week", I hope.  Next week I will be in the US, again with GPP13.  I hope surprises will be kept to a minimum.

Professor for one year (week 7): What is good teaching?

Universities start to hand out "teaching awards".  It's interesting to look at the criteria.

At the University of Zurich, this year's teaching award focused on supporting students during writing a research paper.  The lecturer definitely deserves the award.

However, some statements in the news report made me wonder:  Offering feedback to students' writing, encouraging critical thinking, treating students as prospective colleagues -- isn't that something all lecturers should always aim for in all lectures?  Why is it something special if someone emphasizes self-directed learning?  Why is it notable if someone asks students to hand in a first draft for getting feedback before submitting the final paper?  Why is it surprising that students like challenges?

In my seminars, students have to submit a handout for presentations.  They submit a first version, get feedback, and then the revised version is graded and distributed to all students.  For seminar papers, I demand a proposal including the research question, proposed approaches, and relevant literature.  We then talk about it to improve the problem statement, I recommend further literature, and we discuss the outline of the paper. 

The topics are generally defined rather loosely, giving students the opportunity to make connections to their “other” interests (either outside university or from a different subject) and forcing them to come up with a concrete project proposal themselves.  This requires them to define criteria to estimate success or failure of their project.  This also allows students to judge their own results.  Students rate my courses as challenging but very helpful for understanding a new topic and developing general academic skills.

I always thought, supporting students' learning processes is one of the major tasks of a professor.  Apparently, you can even get an award for your daily work.

Professor for one year (week 6): Maybe the "e" in e-learning in fact stands for "evil"?

These days, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are discussed widely.  They are a success story and they are criticized.  The aspect of "massive" leads to audiences of several thousand students, the aspect of "open" suggests that no tuition has to be paid for attending these courses.  The rest, i.e., "online courses", is a rather old concept.

The development of online courses was one of the key factors of "E-Learning".  Roughly ten years ago, a lot of tax payers' money went into such projects.  Online courses were developed to suit the needs of growing student numbers and to make use of the Internet for teaching ("learn anything, anywhere, anytime").  Students could attend these courses as a replacement for traditional face-to-face lectures.  For example MiLCA was supposed to facilitate learning computational linguistics.  It was developed at the University of Tübingen and some students from the University of Zurich successfully completed the course as part of their studies in Zurich.  However, this was pre-Bologna, i.e., for most of the courses during your studies, there were no formal exams.

Some of these courses are still in use and some universities extend these courses into MOOCs, like the University of Marburg.  They aim to make these courses count towards a BA or MA degree, which means you can earn credit points.

And here the problems start:  To earn credits towards your degree, the attended course has to fit the concept of your study program.  As I wrote last week, the concept of what a module is, differs from university to university.  There might be certain requirements for successfully completing a module like compulsory attendance or an oral exam.  How does that fit into the concept of an online course?  Can a certificate stating completing the online course on phonetics from University of Marburg be used as a replacement for the phonetics course at the University of Konstanz?  Which of the two universities is responsible for quality management?  Who can define how many credit a student can earn?

A colleague even told me that some universities already face a rather odd situation: Students collect online course certificates fitting the overall curriculum of a specific study program and thus avoid attending these courses at their home institution -- i.e., they avoid rather challenging exams, but they want to be awarded the more prestigious degree of that institution.

So if a university starts to accept certificates from online courses offered by other institutions, they open Pandora's box.

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 role of teaching in Higher Ed

European universities emphasize that teaching and research are equally important. 

However, you can observe that rankings are based on publication records and citation, i.e., on research.  When reading job postings for professors, requirements emphasize research.  Maybe it's mentioned that you have to teach in one of the fields of the institution.  In your CV, you emphasize research projects, acquired funding, publications, degrees, and service to the scientific community.  And then you have a list of taught courses at the end of your CV.  In your motivation letter, you write one to two pages about your achievements, leadership, and future research projects.  And the one sentence that you consider teaching an important aspect.

Evaluation of applications or grant proposals is mainly based on your publication record, acquired funding, research stays abroad, your academic age (i.e., how many years have gone by since you got your first or last degree). 

In the late 1990s, German students aiming to become a teacher had less courses on pedagogy and didactics the older the kids would be they would teach: becoming a teacher for elementary school required attending a lot more didactical courses than becoming a teacher for secondary school (Gymnasium).  And of course, no courses are required when teaching at university level.  You just know how to do it, don't you?

So, when you apply for professorship, you are judged by your research.  But substituting for a professor is about teaching exclusively, what you research is about and whether you ever published in a journal or not---no body cares about.  Sometimes, the person substituting for a professor gets paid per hour taught---not including hours spent preparing material, assessing assignments, and supervising students. See this Spiegel article (it's in German, try GoogleTranslate for a sketchy English version).  Teaching doesn't seem to be valued.

The weekly workload of German professors has been increased some years ago in some states---you have to work one hour more, like 41 hours instead of 40.  And this additional hour went completely into teaching.  So working 41 instead of 40 hours a week means teaching 9 hours instead of 8.  This additional hour of teaching is assumed to not require any preparation.  You just go and teach students.

Only recently, PhD programs started requiring attending courses on didactics and teaching.  However, dozens of years will go by before all professors will have a pedagogical education.

What's the situation like in the US?  Do you get (mandatory) pedagogical training before you start teaching?