Chris May nominee for Best Practice Award

UG Best Practice in Teaching & Learning Award 2022

This year’s Education Festival will showcase the brand new ‘Best Practice in Teaching & Learning Award’ (BPA). This new award is the successor of the well known ‘Lecturer of the Year Award’.

Why a Best Practice Award?

The aim of the BPA is to more broadly recognize good teaching and learning practices within the UG. By focusing on the educational designs and methods of the nominated courses, awards can go to either teaching teams or individual lecturers and their teams.

Nominee for University College Groningen

Dr. Chris May is our nominee for this year's Best Practice Award.

His best practice involves the student development of an Open Educational Resource throughout the course Biopsychology.

Biopsychology featured what Chris May called a “Signature Project”, where in a team of 4 - 5, students created, composed, and curated an online portfolio dedicated to an interdisciplinary exploration of a topic of the group’s choice. The Project was to be grounded in neuroscience and incorporate peer-reviewed research.

All Signature Projects were then linked together by the instructor to create an open educational resource (OER). This Signature Project is an example of Open Pedagogy, in which the student is involved in creating an OER for your own and others’ benefit.

General Requirements

• The Project must integrate at least two disciplines, with one of them being neuroscience. The other(s) can be anything else.
• The Project will be hosted online using a platform of the student’s choice. Possible examples include: Google sites, weebly, notion.so, padlet, wordpress, webador, and wix.
• Each student must write 1300 – 1700 words, excluding references. Thus, the length of the Signature Project for a team of 4 will be 5200 – 6800 words and for a team of 5 will be 6500 – 8500 words.
• Each student must review at least two peer-reviewed research articles in the Project, and will present one to the class.

Information on how to vote for Chris May will be shared soon.

All the best wishes to Chris, we hope you win this Award!

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