Moving beyond the Lecture: Towards Collaborative Inquiry-Based Learning with Big Questions

We had been teaching a first-year course on “education in the digital age” as a lecture for a few years. However, we have observed, over the last years, that (1) many students failed to pass the exam and (2) that a lot of them, when in their 4th year, had forgotten most of these theoretical foundations. These considerations have driven us to rethink & redesign our teaching methods and how we assess students learning outcomes. Our pedagogical approach combines various learning & teaching methods that require students to actively and collaboratively construct meaningful knowledge and share it in a community of learners using an online digital portfolio. Overall, we are quite satisfied with our teaching approach but will have to improve our formative assessment practices and will have to set up a digital portfolio solution that is more reliable and leads to greater user satisfaction.