The Education Innovation Working Group of CG has launched a project with the aim of sharing information on innovative approaches to teaching and learning. The project intends to facilitate knowledge transfer and foster possible collaborations among member universities. You will find below key information on Coimbra Group cases of education innovations.

  • Innovative Student-Centered Approach
    For Teaching

    • HR practitioners share with students their professional experiences
      The students enrolled in the master program Personnel Evaluation, Training and Psychological Counseling are invited, in their first year of study, to take part at several meetings with practitioners that work in the fields of organizational psychology and human resources management and development. These specialists share with students’ stories about their professional experiences and their career paths. Students are encouraged to ask questions regarding the professional aspects that are most interesting and important for them. Since the meetings are not very formal, students are very active in discussing various professional and career topics with the invited practitioners. At the end of these meetings, students understand better the opportunities and the difficulties within the domain they have chosen, and are more motivated and optimist.Read More
    • Teaching European Integration: The Case for Role-playing Games in Economic Curriculum
      Our attempt was to improve the way how the courses on European integration look like. To allow students to understand the importance of negotiations in the EU decision making we let them negotiate some of the current problems in the EU. In 2016/2017, students representing various countries and the EU administration negotiated possible resolution of the Italian banking crisis, in 2017/2018 the main topic is the problem of the Irish border in the Brexit negotiations.Read More
    • A definitional ceremony approach to formative evaluation in higher education
      The narrative practice applied in education was the Definitional Ceremony consisting in a group (community) storytelling, in structuring story-teller and witness roles. The core of the narrative facilitation consists of the engagement of the storytelling/auditory “communities” in the development of a richer story stimulating members’ identity reflections of the participating groups (communities). Thus, this practice entails the concept of “narrative identity”, where identity formation is a relational product, a public and social result of identification and authentication of personal preferences and desired expressions of experience, in this case, of learning experiences and conclusions based on them. The practice consists of a final course “event” organized as a celebration of learning and transformation in a genuine formative evaluation of master courses using narrative approaches.Read More

  • Technology Enhanced
    Learning

    • English for Educational Sciences - Online Course
      The main aim of the online course is to teach reading skills and to help (French-speaking) students analyze the structure and content of scientific texts written in English. The course is based on different topics related to educational sciences. Analysis and commentary of the texts are done through a series of podcasts, followed by exercises with (sometimes individual) feedback. The platform used for the online course is MOODLE (official e-learning platform of our university). Vocabulary and grammar are studied in context and reinforced by systematic exercises with detailed feedback.Read More
    • Innovation in the teaching of physics and chemistry: learning by doing
      This work shows briefly the planning followed in the subjects “Didactic”, “Innovation” and “Evaluation” in Physics and Chemistry owned to the Official Master´s Degree in Teaching in Secondary Schools, Vocational Training and Language Centers from the University of Salamanca. The main objective of the activities we program is for students to acquire the competences of the Master through active learning, turning the classroom into a laboratory where students are sometimes objects and others are the authors of the experience. The sessions are based in series of experiments in Physics and Chemistry. A methodology is followed through the culture of thought, fostering collaborative work, metacognition activities, mental maps, etc. It reflects the need to motivate the learning process, as well as to stimulate the creativity in future students. The sessions in the laboratory and the field trips cannot be absent from the activities. As a tool to measure physical magnitudes as well as to carry out and / or answer questionnaires, different Smartphone applications are used. The degree of acquisition of competences is evaluated by asking students to publish the results obtained in different virtual platforms such as on a YouTube channel in a personal blog of each student, or simply in an individual notebook. This way of organizing the subjects, contributes to bring to the classroom the passion that we feel for Physics and Chemistry as teachers.Read More
    • Minecraft for project management
      We propose to the first-year students to use the videogame Minecraft to learn the project management. Since we want to ensure that there are no mandatory technological knowledge, the use of a videogame allows us to let the students acquire project management competences without a bias from their high school background. During the first semester, all the students have one month to achieve a project on the virtual environment. During this month the only specifications they have is to build something with automatic systems in small groups (from 5 to 6 students). They spend at least 3 hours per week on this project and may continue during their free time in the whole month. 2 hours per week are in the presence of a teacher to evaluate and exchange on their planning, communication and teamwork. At the end of the month each will present his work to the other ones. Since the goal of the module is to ensure that the students progress on the project management and not on the videogame, the role of the teacher in the module is very important. He must evaluate the whole project planning, group communication, teamwork and student’s leadership for each group. Then on the second semester, a third of the students continue with Minecraft while the rest of them work on a technical project.Read More

  • Internationalization And Intercultural Aspects Of The Curriculum

    • Making the most of cross-cultural group work
      As well as educator managed group allocations, the careful selection of seminar case studies can contribute to better more meaningful cross-cultural exchanges in Business School seminars, so that all members of the group have an opportunity to foreground their knowledge and no one category of student is advantaged because they always understand the context of the cases.Read More
    • Escritiva – Creative writing in Portuguese classes
      Through different student centered activities (reading, translation, literary creation, participation in radio programs, review, meeting and discussion with writers, literary routes in Portugal, participation in different creative writing contests* etc.) we aimed to expand and diversify the intercultural contact areas of students of Portuguese as a foreign or second language, both inside and outside the classroom, collaborating in the promotion and nourishment of the micronarrative blog 77 palavras (77 words). This blog was coordinated by the writer and expert on creative writing, Margarida Fonseca Santos.Read More

  • Continuous Professional
    Development

    • Entrepreneurs Workshops
      The aim is to carry out eminently practical workshops to promote the entrepreneurial spirit in the students of the University and they learn as practically as possible how to create a business.Read More