Up close: Senior Fellow Karin Rebel

The different disciplines need to cooperate effectively in order to resolve major issues.

Dr. Karin Rebel, associate professor in Environmental Sciences at the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development, has been appointed senior fellow at the Centre for Academic Teaching. “My aim is to develop a module in which students from different universities and different disciplines can collaborate remotely on major sustainability issues.”

Just imagine: doing a course in which you collaborate with students from Eindhoven and Wageningen on a key issue involving sustainability. Because the distance and timetable clashes make it impossible to meet every day, all collaboration happens digitally. The same applies to the lectures, which you can watch live at home. The collaborative process runs smoothly because you have a different background from your fellow students from Eindhoven and Wageningen and you can explore the issue together from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Inter-university and interdisciplinary cooperation

This is what Dr Karin Rebel envisages when she talks about the project she will be launching as she takes her position as senior fellow at the Centre for Academic Teaching on 1 September. “In research, there is increasing cooperation between faculties and universities. This is less the case in teaching. However, the different disciplines need to cooperate effectively in order to resolve major issues. I aim to identify what the needs of such a collaboration between Utrecht, Eindhoven and Wageningen are and to develop a module involving inter-university and interdisciplinary cooperation. I also intend to focus on the technologies that will make this possible. Such as live lectures given remotely, where students can put questions immediately. Or developing a digital collaborative environment, in which students from different universities can work together. I also aim to forge links between different courses with different timetables and different study loads. This pilot should ultimately result in more inter-university collaboration in teaching.”

More focus on development in teaching

The Centre for Academic Teaching is a University-wide initiative intended to generate a greater focus on developments in teaching. Lecturers can use the centre for information, knowledge-sharing, support and training that focuses on their own professional development and educational innovation. A senior fellow has the opportunity to develop educational leadership at the University and this position takes them a step closer to a position as professor with a focus on teaching. Moreover, a senior fellow is someone with proven leadership skills and a clear future vision for academic teaching.

Delve even deeper

Rebel herself was the brains behind the sustainability game Utrecht2040, to be played by all Bachelor's programmes in Geosciences during this year’s introduction. She also chaired the curriculum committee that established the international Bachelor's programme in Global Sustainability Sciences some years ago. Not only do 15 to 20% of the Bachelor’s students come from outside the Netherlands, what is on offer is a mixture of science and social science subjects that are all interlinked in order to tackle major sustainability issues in an interdisciplinary way. “This fellowship will enable me to delve even deeper into the development of interdisciplinary sustainability education”, says Rebel.