Doctoral seminar in higher education and digital pedagogy - What's new in 2022

An expended program

Since 2017, the Doctoral Seminar in Higher Education and Digital Pedagogy has been one day long, held in September and then in January. Three topics were addressed: designing a course, teaching a class, and evaluating students.

For the seventh edition, the Institute for Skills and Innovation (ISI) has rethought and expanded this format. The program is now modeled on the one offered to Sciences Po teachers. It combines training with hands-on workshops.

Five themes are addressed during training: Sciences Po’s digital pedagogical ecosystem and useful teaching resources; designing a course; facilitating a course; an introduction to Wooclap; and designing and sharing learning resources.

Two workshops complete the program: Assessment and grading, and a new workshop designed by ISI, Teaching for the First Time.

This new workshop aims to respond to a long-term request from PhD students from the School of Research: time for discussing and sharing doubts and hesitations that come up when preparing one’s first class. During this workshop, participants were invited to ask questions such as: how to justify yourself in front of your students? How to be assertive and find the right pedagogical tone? What to do if there is tension or conflict with students?

The doctoral students signed up online on a dedicated BilletWeb page. They followed their choice of sessions either in person at the Learning Lab or online via Zoom. Most of the sessions were available in hybrid.

More participants, higher satisfaction

Since it was created, the Doctoral Seminar in Higher Education and Digital Pedagogy has been very much appreciated by its participants. The responses to an evaluation questionnaire after each edition have been very positive. Between 75 and 100% of students say that they are “satisfied or very satisfied” with the quality of the training materials, the activities offered, and the discussions with members of ISI.

But what was most remarkable about the October-November 2022 edition is the impressive increase in the number of participants in comparison with previous editions. For this seventh edition, the number of participants actually tripled!

These two elements indicate that the new program and the new schedule respond well to doctoral students’ expectations. For this reason, ISI will keep those elements in the program, while continuing to enrich them for the 2023 session!