Interdisciplinary Teaching for Translational Science

1. Alignment of assessment to learning objectives: Students should analyze problems from the perspective of different disciplines. For that they have to extract, evaluate, and apply relevant information, not only from the submitted documents but also from defined websites and databases. To allow for this a realistic test environment is created which grants access to this information.

2. The problems require an interdisciplinary approach: A complex problem will be discussed in a larger workgroup. First, expert teams are formed, which then regroup into practice teams. The teams may contact the lecturers, but also external experts and, where possible, stakeholders from the society.

3. The project work is presented to the public in a poster presentation. Also the Bachelor students will be invited and can already prepare for their own project work. This results in a better quality of work from year to year. For the Master students the projects serve as a preparation for their Master’s thesis.

4. Students will be involved in assessing the presentations. They analyze the work from an expert team point of view and discuss their attitude in their practice team (groups assess groups).

5. Upon completion of the project work, the feedback of all stakeholders will be collected with questionnaires and interviews. In an annual quality management workshop with three participating lecturers and three students, measures are defined for a better alignment of the two-semester course in itself and to the overall curriculum and for a continuous improvement of content and organization. The three students are used as assistants for the next implementation to establish a continuity on the part of the students. So the course will become more and more student-centered from year to year.

No single measure, but Instructional Design for an entire course taking into account the curriculum.
Establishing a continuous development of the course with involvement of students promotes student-centered teaching and learning.

A realistic test environment allows the alignment with learning outcomes at higher levels of competence.
Critical Thinking is stimulated as the students will also be involved in assessing the group work.

Gamification funtioniert nur bei einem Teil der Studierenden und sollte daher optional sein.

The students’ reactions were divided. One (larger) group found the approach exciting and was enthusiastic, the group not related to games was rather stressed by the new approach.

• Group work with real projects is exciting if enough projects are provided
• Gamification does not work for all students and should therefore be used optionally
• Group work helps to convey complex issues by experiencing them in a concrete situation (contextual learning)