Blind pedagogic flying

I took part in University Pedagogy (UP2.2, 2019): Assessment of Learning and Giving Feedback. It was probably the pedagogy course that I have enjoyed so far most. Maybe because it was arranged at the Kumpula campus with natural science-savy teachers? Also my peer group is probably to blame!

Becoming a qualified teacher in Finland

The degree requirements for the 60-credit module in University Pedagogy (UP) consist of 25 credits of basic studies and 35 credits of intermediate studies. Although UP focuses on teaching at the university, the completed module qualifies you also for teaching at schools. The Pedagogy Center of the University of Helsinki organizes the courses of the basic study modules (25 ECTS credits) in English. However, if you want to complete the whole module, you will need to take courses that are only offered in Finnish or Swedish. That means you cannot become a qualified ("pätevä") teacher without knowing Finnish or Swedish. I do not know whether my Finnish is meanwhile good enough to be able to do that. For the time being, I stick to the courses taught in English.

University Pedagogy 2.2 (2019)

In the 2019 autumn term, I took the UP2.2 course (without taking UP2.1 first). We had a very nice teacher (Jokke Häsä), but I still don't understand why he switched from doing Mathematics to teaching Pedagogy. Certainly, a win for pedagogy since he understands the statistics and we had some interesting forth-and-back about the statistics of the Johnston & Miles paper that we were reading. The paper is also attached to the original post (https://jeltsch.org/UP2.2) and the reporting about their statistical methods leaves much room for interpretation. I actually sent an email to the first author, but she had just retired a few months ago. Although I did not get a failure-of-delivery error, she perhaps did not anymore feel the need to respond.

Blind flying

For me, one of the biggest issues was, that I had nothing to compare to when I was preparing my assignments. When I am writing manuscripts for journals, I have thousands of examples that I can study and to which I can compare. So I decided during the course that I would make all my assignments public. Embarrassment included. But maybe some future participants of UP2.2 will have something to compare to. Sort of an exemplar. Not perfect, but passable. I only post my own assignments, none of the group work.

All my assignments available under CC0 (= no strings attached)

All this stuff is shared under the CC0: Use it as you wish, no need to acknowledge me. The group assignment is the only thing missing here since I would need to get everybody's green light, which is not going to happen. I should have done this 9 months ago, but I simply forgot. There was just too much other stuff happening.

I did ok in the course, but I still don't know anything

What grade did I get? Our group assignment got a 5 (on the scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is the best grade) and my own stuff a 4. Thanks to all the great members of the team <em>Carbonara</em>! That averaged out as a 5 for the whole course. For some strange reason, the Moodle course page still shows that I only completed 66% of the course assignments, but WebOodi shows that I received the credits. So much for the wonders of our IT systems...

Where are the files?

You can find all the files from my private homepage at jeltsch.org.