Preparing for in-depth work lecture with the e-modules in Xerte

At the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences (Faculty of Science), Liesbeth Bijlsma, together with a team of lecturers, runs the Neurology course for 270 students a year. This course is composed of a coherent set of various online and on campus learning activities. Lecturer Liesbeth Bijlsma felt it was important for students to be able to master the necessary basic knowledge for a particular topic independently, before practising with the material in a more in-depth tutorial. She now uses the e-modules in the Xerte tool for this purpose.

Goals

A key goal for deploying the Xerte tool was to use teaching time on campus more effectively. By allowing students to master the required knowledge through self-study, time on campus can be used for in-depth learning. Course topics are also often perceived as difficult. Therefore, Liesbeth wanted to support students well by offering this knowledge in different ways. These include knowledge clips, overview figures and texts from textbooks and relevant literature. Thanks to the structured design and built-in formative assessment, the Xerte modules help students structure their knowledge, separate main and side issues and independently test their acquired understanding.

Results

Students structurally indicate that they find the e-modules incredibly pleasant to work with, says Liesbeth. They particularly appreciate the clarity about intended learning goals and the way the offered material matches the learning goals, the concrete short explanations in knowledge clips and the practice questions. Students are also motivated to do the preparation. Students generally come well prepared to the working lectures, which allows us to really use the working lectures for deepening and not for revisiting self-study.

So, above all, make use of Xerte! In many situations, this is a good way to move from classical knowledge transfer via lectures to a flipped-classroom model where the time with students in class can be used for in-depth study. A point of attention, though, is how strongly you take students by the hand and what this does to development of self-regulation. And, collaborate especially with fellow teachers working on similar topics, a lot of exchange of material is possible and this can easily be realised within Xerte.