Teaching Theories of Urbanism

This chapter introduces the theories of urbanism courses offered at the Urbanism Department in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. Urbanism is a discipline which has a crucial impact on how humans interact with the built environment. Understanding its theories is important and will be increasingly so in the twenty...

Flipping the Advanced System Dynamics classroom

This paper describes lessons learned while teaching Advanced System Dynamics, at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at Delft University of Technology. The course is an elective for Master students of the faculty who are already familiar with system dynamics modelling. We report on the course in the academic year 2014-2015, the...

Ubiquitous learning and massive communication in MOOCs: Revisiting the role of teaching as a praxis

In the present study, we refer to Carr's theory on the nature of educational practice for evaluating teaching as a praxis in relation to two major changes, i.e. ubiquitous learning and massive communication caused by MOOCs. With regard to the first change, we argue that the teacher is faced with the problem of encouraging the learners to get...

Teaching and learning science through design activities: A revision of design-based learning

Assessing gaming simulation validity for training traffic controllers.

Background. The Dutch railway company ProRail is performing large-scale capacity upgrades to their infrastructure network. As part of these upgrades, ProRail uses gaming simulations to help prepare train traffic controllers for new infrastructure situations. Researching the validity of these gaming simulations is essential, since the conclusions...

Bringing real-world problems into the classroom

Real world problems are a challenge and a motivator for students to learn understanding and using the concepts of systems and actors. But using real world problems in the classroom is not without challenges and dilemmas. In the paper we explicitly address the issue of the need for quite intense support for the students when tackling real life...

Teaching environmental sustainability in higher education

The challenges of sustainable engineering and design are complex and so are the challenges of teaching sustainability to higher education students. This paper deals with teaching environmental sustainability, with a specific focus on the sustainability of buildings. The paper addresses specifically the higher professional and academic education....

A cognitive approach to research and education

What do we mean by research? How could we explain it in terms of a semantic network? Do we need to make research to learn? Is it necessary for our own education as a researcher? Does it make a substantial contribution to educating ourselves? Do researchers need teaching to improve their research. What kind of methods could we use for research...

Emphaty oriented 'creative' teaching and learning methodologies

Understanding learners’ minds has become one of the major issues of some methodologists in education system. The entire matter is learning. It seems obvious to me it is necessary to explain what learning is in terms of knowledge, in the widest sense. We should also try to find out what kind of cognitive structure is behind of it regarding all...