MTEC Minor Online Foundations Course in Management and Economics

The original plan for the MTEC Minor Foundations Course was to create an online course on key management and economics concepts to introduce students to useful foundations for the MTEC MSc study programme. The course aimed at presenting core concepts from both managerial and economic perspectives and was supposed to be co-created with the MTEC student association to bring in the authentic voices of MTEC students. The pandemic brought us back to the drawing board.
The project refocused on increasing students’ life-long learning skills to support the development of their sense-making skills for their studies. We work on tapping into students’ intrinsic motivation to study, help them learn effectively (to free up time) and build healthy learning routines that remain useful also after their graduation. The project is about helping students embrace an identity as professional learners. Our rational was that this would spill over into their individual approaches to build their foundations for a successful learning journey during their MTEC MSc studies – and as the course is scalable and of a more generic nature – useful to a broad audience of students of diverse backgrounds.

The originally intended course design saw itself confronted with changes that the pandemic caused for teaching at ETH. In the light of changes to online and remote teaching, we shifted the priorities of the course away from delivering content on MTEC topics to supporting students in being able to make sense and reflect on their own approach to learning at ETH.
Building on the outlined modifications to the original proposal, we successfully realized the first pilot of the course «363-1165-00L Effective Learning Strategies” in the Spring Semester 2022 with 40 enrolled students. It is an interactive cohort-based online course that helps students refine their learning skills. Students are encouraged to embrace a lifelong learning career and look beyond the need of passing exams. For the contents, we produced a total of 4 videos (around 15mins each) that address the most effective learning strategies. The course also integrated short clips of student voices that we had produced to nudge enrolled students to make the most of their study time (link to the playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXpVkZF4mdQA0232TBkHbTPrnGYtfgw_j )
Based on participants’ feedback, we redesigned course contents to develop an e-mail based course with knowledge nuggets. We increased the accessibility and scalability of the course by translating email marketing strategies to deliver microlearning units directly into students email inbox. These developments were scripted with a student assistant to ensure that learning materials resonated with students’ experiences. The pilot of the e-mail based course ran with 20 participants from the ETH/EPFL joint doctoral programme in Learning Science (Prof. Manu Kapur). The report on results was promising.

The project goals were readjusted early for several reasons. The general support for the initial Ideas at the department waned due to personnel changes (leaving of the study coordinator) and unexpected push-back on suggested curriculum changes. The changes to teaching during the lockdown in 2020 also initiated a reassessment of what is needed by students. We realised that an online course does not need to deliver more information – the content is readily available. Instead, we aimed to increase the lifelong learning skills of students to better make sense of information they encounter during their studies.

A semester long course on learning strategies was absent in the ETH curriculum. In conversation with students, we designed a course outline that covered these skills:
1. Foundations of Learning
2. Note-Taking
3. Note-Making
4. Learning in Public

Based on the feedback from the course in Spring 2022, we formatted the contents into an email-based course that now contains 24 sections (emails). The course is now self-paced and scalable to a large audience. Contents and exercises are delivered in short daily emails. The course can be implemented (taught) with an email campaign tool (e.g. Inxmail, MailChimp, Mailerlite etc.) or even a regular email programme (e.g. Outlook).