My name is Cita Nørgård and I am a senior educational consultant in SDUUP.
I am a biologist but have been teaching my entire work life and now within “teaching and learning in higher education”.
I am particularly interested in teaching in laboratories and other practical settings, teaching in innovation and entrepreneurship, together with the development of curriculums for university programmes. Virtual Reality (VR) as a teaching field is also an interest of mine. Generally, I work with a broad approach to didactic subjects, including teaching optics, student optics and extern parties.
When I offer assistance, sometimes it takes place person-to-person as consultations or as supervision; this is usually a fruitful way to move on if you experience challenges in your teaching. However, many of my activities take place through projects, networking activities and courses. The advantage of this kind of activities is that as a participant in for example network activities and courses, you will meet colleagues who are also interested in and/or are challenged by the same matters as you. You can then spar and have practice-oriented discussions with broadness and topicality. ”XR Club” Is a network for people who are interested in VR, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality. The participants count both students, teachers and businesses. This is a fine example of how we focus on teaching by using different activities and create a broadness, so that we get around subjects that are relevant for both teachers, study leaders, students and the business world.
I have also organised an online hackathon for teachers within innovation and entrepreneurship. Here, Søren Buchholtz Storm, an Assistant Professor with 11 years of experience being a professional engineer, participated: “It varies, what I take from the online courses I attend; sometimes I can use it in a very tangible way and sometimes it is a way of reflecting over the choices I make in connection with organising courses. In that way, SDUUP work as a kind of lifeline for me – I can be sure that what I make is coherent and up to date.” He thinks that courses that use his profession as a starting point and then apply a pedagogic framework afterwards are most appealing and meaningful because they give new ways to reflect over the pedagogic element in a well-known field. In addition, it is good way to discover what others do and to know their reasons for making their choices. “SDUUP gives you good tools to approach pedagogics which is very useful for a new teacher.” Therefore, teaches become better teachers when they approach their profession from a pedagogical angle – and this is precisely where SDUUP can help: “It works best when the well-known professional field gets a pedagogical angle, because it becomes clear that the choices made when organising courses are not random. Therefore, I definitely think that SDUUP has important capacities”.