Centre for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
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Our mission
The Centre for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education provides opportunities for professional development that are aimed at facilitating, promoting and recognizing excellence in university teaching and learning. The centre also assists and consults universities in building institutional capacity in areas such as educational development, curriculum development and academic leadership. It is the leading provider in the field of teaching and learning at universities of applied sciences and universities of teacher education in German-speaking Switzerland.
What we do
Academic development programmes
As our core business, we offer a wide selection of Certificate of Advanced Study programmes (CAS) and courses that focus on teaching and learning in higher education. We offer the CAS in higher education twice a year on a regular basis (one starting in winter and one starting in summer) as well as those tailored to the specific needs of faculties, schools and universities of applied sciences.
In addition, we offer the CAS Leading Projects and Study Programmes in Higher Education every other year.
We also provide a selection of one-day courses in the form of workshops, seminars, webinars or conferences. In addition, we offer a range of intensive courses designed to obtain credit points (ECTS points).
Counselling and coaching
We offer counselling and training services for lecturers, mentors and university members as well as for people in management positions at universities, institutions of higher education or other educational organisations in the tertiary sector. Our counselling services are not only aimed at individuals but also offered for groups. In addition, we moderate team events and team development processes.
Blended coaching is our didactic approach that integrates individual counselling in teaching. We regard counselling as a competence indispensable for teaching and learning as well as for a lecturing or leadership position.
Curriculum design and development
The Centre for Teaching in Higher Education and Higher Education Development (ZHE) offers counselling and training services as well as coaching in order to optimise the curriculum design and to develop bachelor’s, master’s or CAS programmes at universities of applied sciences and universities of teacher education.
Research
Questions such as ‘What is it that we do when we teach?‘, ‘Why do we do it?‘, and ‘How does it work?‘ are central to the self-reflection and evaluation of our own teaching. It is part of our own professional development to be aware of our own didactical approaches, interventions and decisions as well as to critically question why we do what we do.
We are engaged in research on teaching and learning in higher education. Our emphasis is on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and on the transfer of academic development programmes to the teaching practice. By analysing evidence from our own teaching programmes, we enhance our scholarly knowledge and use it to improve our own practice as academic developers, lecturers and researchers. We present the results of this work at national and international conferences on higher education teaching and we publish articles in scientific journals as well as books in various languages. Our centre is well connected to European and international networks for academic development. The members of our centre act as reviewers of scientific articles on teaching and learning in higher education and as academic counsellors for European and Latin American teachers, programmes and institutions.
Our centre is a member of the Swiss Faculty Development Network (SFDN). We have a tradition of contributions to congresses of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Bildungsforschung (SGBF), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Hochschuldidaktik (DGHD), the International Conference of Educational Development (ICED), the European Group of the International Society of SoTL (ISSoTL, EuroSoTL), the European Congress of Educational Research (ECER), and the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI).
In summer 2019, a Professorship in Higher Education was established as part of our centre. Franziska Zellweger holds the position with a research focus on student engagement.
Capacity building and internationalisation
The Centre for Teaching in Higher Education and Higher Education is internationally oriented: in the past, we designed and performed teacher trainings for neighbouring countries such as Liechtenstein, Germany and Austria, but we have also been active in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
We collaborate with the Department of International Projects in Education of the Zurich University of Teaching Education in two joint projects: LECU (Learning Cultures in Higher Education) aims to reflect and exchange experiences with academics from universities of teacher education in Switzerland, Albania and Kosovo, and SINAN (Swiss-North African Network) with academics from Switzerland, Egypt and Tunisia.
Customized offers
In addition to our wide range of services for individual competence development, we also provide tailor-made offers guided by the following maxims:
- Nothing is impossible
- Good contract clarification is the basis for customer satisfaction.
- Your ideas and interests are at the centre of our services.
- Your existing knowledge is complemented by our expertise.