Departmental seminar series and journal club with enhanced learning outcomes

Abstract

Listening to scientific presentations and reading scientific literature are core activities of any scientist, and frequent components of students' curricula. When employing these activities in teaching, finding the right balance between student instruction and autonomous learning is important for best learning outcomes and teachers’ workload. We here present our course design for a coordinated lecture series and journal club, that finds this balance by leveraging modern learning concepts in a digital environment. Participating students were tasked to read a landmark scientific paper every week ahead of a lecture by a scientist with practical experience on the topic of that paper, often an author of that week’s paper. Students then had to hand in written answers to three questions probing their understanding of the topic and the paper. In a subsequent seminar, activating questions were discussed by the students in break-out rooms and then answered by randomly chosen students in class, followed by a broad discussion that included the homework questions. Students gave weekly feedback on their learning progress and experience, and the course was then dynamically adapted accordingly. This yielded a course with largely increased course capacity, reduced teachers’ workload, and substantially enhanced learning outcomes, qualitatively and quantitatively compared to previous implementations of the course.