SEFI 2025 Annual Conference | Engineering and Society | 15-18 September 2025 | Tampere Call…
The new MOOC for Doctoral Teaching Assistants of Engineering
Doctoral teaching assistants play a critical role in many courses, but they often lack the time and resources to build their teaching skills. A new MOOC aims to meet this need using education data of students.
The Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) “Foundations of Teaching Science and Engineering” is the first of its kind available to doctoral teaching assistants, and the first EPFL MOOC on teaching. It’s also unique because it uses real data gathered from undergraduate classes across EPFL’s eight faculties and colleges by students in the master’s level course, How People Learn.
Information about the course:
Some people think that teaching is simply a matter of knowing the content material and having the right kind of personality and experience. In fact, research evidence suggests that people can become effective teachers if they learn:
- the content of their discipline
- the different ways students learn this content and the problems they face with it
- how to manage learning in practice in a classroom.
This MOOC focuses on the second and third of these elements.
What you’ll learn
- What does recent research say about teaching science or engineering
- What should students learn about experimentation, problem-solving and managing projects
- What is good practice in presenting, questioning and giving feedback
- How to manage a class and to facilitate group work
- How to apply these skills when teaching exercises, labs, and projects
- Ways to assess learning that are fair, valid and reliable
To apply, please click here.