Semester Coordination: There's Still Time!

Semester coordination is much more than timetable planning. It is also about how your students experience connections across the courses they are taking. When there is strong coherence between courses, you can help students engage more deeply with the subject matter. At the same time, it is about how you, as a teaching team, help build a group of students who feel comfortable and confident with one another and with you as their lecturers, so that they dear interact both in class and beyond the classroom. A strong sense of belonging also influences students' motivation to attend classes and explore the content together and with you.

Subject Integration

The key is that, as a lecturer, you are aware of the themes being addressed in parallel courses during, before and after the weeks in which you teach. Not only in your own course, but across the other courses as well.

Transfer refers to the application of knowledge to new cases, themes, learning situations, and so forth. We hope and expect, and perhaps even believe, that it happens naturally, but the reality is that transfer needs to be facilitated. The more collaboration there is across courses, the better you support your students.

Deep learning depends to a large extent on transfer. Students need to reconcile new knowledge with knowledge they have already acquired, and “tacit” insights may become “explicit” insights precisely because you help create the conditions for deep learning.

What you can do:

• As a teaching team, identify the topics you work with throughout the semester so that you do not operate as isolated individuals.
• Discuss whether there are themes that lend themselves to common approaches or perhaps even a short student-driven project that connects two or more subjects at the same time.
• Give students the opportunity and time to explore the subject matter in depth. Let them identify similarities, differences, hypotheses, and models that they can investigate and test together. This may be far more important for deep learning than completing numerous assignments designed simply to apply theories.

Academic Integration is Social Integration

We increasingly hear that students do not feel comfortable asking their peers for advice when they are uncertain about something and would rather ask AI. This is something we need to address, and it can only be done within the classroom. Therefore, since the arrival of AI, the role of the lecturer has changed.

It must be legitimate for students to adopt an exploratory approach, discuss ideas together, and work collaboratively towards sound explanations and outcomes. In that process, they will take detours, explore alternative paths, and eventually find more direct routes to understanding. Your role is increasingly to encourage and support this exploration, encouraging students to navigate the whole landscape of possibilities together during class so that they become accustomed to having meaningful academic conversations with one another.

Our pedagogical goal must be to make it more interesting and rewarding for students to explore the subject matter with you and their peers than to receive answers from AI. The reason is that AI answers can bypass the entire exploratory phase and result in short-term learning without deeper understanding.
Use your time with students wisely so that you gain insight into how they think and how they make sense of the relationships and explanatory structures within the subject matter. Also explore how your students use AI when learning, and whether they use it thoughtfully or merely to obtain simple answers and summaries:

• Give students time during class to explore theories together. This helps create academic confidence among peers when working on questions that do not have a single correct answer but need to be figured out collaboratively.
• Design tasks that require students to discuss the validity of AI-generated responses in relation to other resources such as textbooks, datasets from their own investigations, laboratory work within your field, and other relevant sources.
• Optimise the organisation of your teaching so that you deliberately make students work together. This may involve large-group teaching formats such as Team-Based Learning sessions, smaller class groups with well-organised group work, discussions between groups, and other collaborative learning activities.

If the way you challenge your students does not offer opportunities for exploration into the content, then assignments and projects may need to be redesigned or include greater flexibility in order to stimulate discussion and inquiry among students. Perhaps single-subject assignments are not what is needed. Instead, there may be value in drawing on connections between two subjects.