Student-designed Honours Seminar (2024/2025: Semester 2 – Spring)

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Course aim

After completing the course, students are able to:
  • generate ideas
  • exercise independent learning
  • work with the principle of self-assessment
  • create and stimulate a learning community within the course
  • provide material and experiences that can be used to filter back to the regular curriculum
  • independently find and review literature on the topic of their choice and derive a set of academically relevant and clearly formulated questions to be explored and researched during the course
  • elaborate these questions into a complete course plan, consisting of a detailed course manual with weekly contents and procedures
  • produce a number of self-chosen assessment pieces that testify to high-level academic quality
  • combine insights from various academic disciplines or fields of study, and derive overarching conclusions from them
The full course outline is submitted to the Honours Director for approval in the semester before the course is scheduled to take place.

Course content

Pre-registration for this course is possible, but only finalised by the honours director after selection.

The content of this course is determined by the students, guided and advised by the course supervisor(s). It must be an interdisciplinary topic, that is a topic that is studied from the perspective of multiple disciplines with the goal of integration of the different findings. Course supervisors change every time the course is offered.
Students who indicate an interest in this course but who do not obviously meet the criteria will be interviewed by the Honours director and the intended supervisor.
Format
The course takes the form of a seminar with student-organised lectures, workshops, and presentations. The exact format differs per topic, and the course proceeds as described in the full course outline, produced by the students in the course of the previous semester.

Grading and necessary assessment pieces
This is a Pass/Fail course. The Honours Director will receive from the supervisor the P/F grade for each of the students.
Students describe their learning activities and grading components in their outline. They must include:
  • A final essay: each students writes a paper on the topic of the course that integrates the perspective of at least 2 disciplines, consist in at least 1000 words, be based on at least 5 sources and can include video, drawings, etc. The paper-supervisor (who can be the course-supervisor or another colleague) communicates their P/F grade + a few lines of feedback to: the student, the course-supervisor and the honours director, by the Spring semester grading deadline.
  • The final symposium, in which the students share their experiences and lessons learned with the whole UCU community and their educational recommendations: Honours teaching is meant to be an experimental garden for educational innovation. The Honours director communicates to the students their collective P/F grade and a few lines of narrative assessment about quality of the presentation(s), reflection on what kind of spillover do students envision to regular courses, PR, Q&A, snacks…
  • a self-evaluation document, produced by the whole group (not individually), which will be linked to the "Overview of previous topics": https://students.uu.nl/en/university-college-utrecht/academics/curriculum-enrichment-options/student-led-honours-seminar. It can be in any form the students wish, e.g. a pptx, a vlog, a video, a text (circa 5 minutes, 750 words). In this document the students share their experience with the future generation students; it is based on a log kept throughout the course, and communicates their reflections as a group on personal growth and content learned, and their recommendations. The Honours director communicates to the students their collective P/F grade and a few lines of narrative assessment

Instructional formats

INT research

Examination

participation

Required | Weight 100% | ECTS 7.5

*midterm FEEDBACK*

Not required

Entry requirements and preknowledge

Entry Requirements

You must have at least 60 credits of the bachelor program

Preknowledge

Recommended: breadth requirement completed; at least one of the major tracks completed; relevant methodology courses/lab courses completed; GPA 3.3 or higher and being in your senior year.

Languages

  • English

Competences

  • Interdisciplinarity
  • Critical reading
  • Listening
  • Research skills
  • Presenting
  • Collaboration

Course Iterations

Related studies

Exams

There is no timetable available of the exams

Required Materials

  • DIVERSE
    The course materials should be determined by the students, along with the supervisor. A literature list should be in place before the semester in which the course runs.

Recommended Materials

No information available on the recommended literature

Remarks

Pass/Fail honours course; does not count towards graduation requirements. Final enrollment after selection.

Coördinator

dr. G van der Ree G.vanderRee@uu.nl

Lecturers

dr. G van der Ree G.vanderRee@uu.nl

Enrolment

Attention: this course is not open to students from other faculties, so subsidiary students can't enroll for this course.

Go to OSIRIS-enrolments
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