The best do the basics better

[Jakob Surber]

ETH is one of the top ten universities in the world, yet some lectures have poor quality. Many European universities require a basic didactic training for lecturers. ETHZ is not among them. My proposal is therefore to set measurable minimum standards for teaching. Lecturers who repeatedly fail these standards would be required to take a course in didactics. As a top notch university we should have top notch education.
However, according to an employee of the LET (Lehrentwicklung und Technologie) there are lecturers who refuse to take any didactic classes. One of my professors, who dismissed any kind of feedback at the end of the semester, falls in this category. Yet a lot of great lecturers have taken courses at the LET, and it makes a considerable difference in the quality of their classes.
As one of the worlds top universities we should fulfill basic requirements that are standard in other European countries. We should have minimum didactic standards.

To put this in perspective I gathered a list of examples of bad teaching, which I have seen at ETH.

Teaching:
– PowerPoint presentations containing copy-pasted parts in up to 4 different languages.
– Presentations with up to 120 (!) slides per double-lecture.
– No questions or any other type of interaction in class during the entire class.
– Lecturers reading the content of their slides word by word for more than 20min.
– Presentations having so much text crammed on one slide that they become illegible.
– Confusingly written scripts with sentences up to seven(!) lines long.
– Lecturer does not show up to class because it is "self-study".
– Not being prepared for a Prüfungesinsicht (no model solutions) or simply not showing up at all.

Organisation
– Parts of slides / scripts are missing.
– Different lecturers in the same class use different web services to upload materials.
– No link from mystudies to the course materials.
– Not showing up for class and informing students about it 10 minutes earlier by mail.

[Karin]

Dear Jacob

Thank you very much for your considered and honest post. We are really pleased to see that students are interested in discussing effective teaching at ETH. I would like to add that as didactical training at ETH is voluntary we are really impressed with the number of teaching staff who approach us for advice and guidance, and who sign up for our various courses. In fact, they are usually oversubscribed. The course evaluation process has also proven to be an excellent way to stimulate discussion about teaching practice.

I am looking forward to further discussion and concrete suggestions of how we at ETH can support and encourage ongoing development of effective learning environments.

Best regards,
Karin

[Author]

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