Arqus Teaching Excellence Awards Winners Awarded
During Arqus Annual conference at Grac University, on April 5th, Arqus Teaching Excellence Awards Winners were awarded. This Award honours teachers of all disciplines at one of the Arqus universities and celebrates examples which are recognized as excellent and innovative in the context of university teaching.
The winning project in the category of enabling research-based teaching was by Margarida Correia-Neves and Jorge Hernâni-Eusébio from the School of Medicine at the University of Minho. Together with Beatriz Costa, Carolina Lopes, Carolina Martins, Célia Araújo, Duarte Baptista, and Nuno Madureira a course "Humanitarian Medicine - Thinking Global, Acting Local" was prepared.
Under the motto “For a more humane medicine”, the course includes aspects of humanitarian medicine, humanism in health and human rights that were missing from the core curriculum of the Integrated Master in Medicine. The knowledge and competencies to acquire are required to act on a global and intercultural world, both at the doorstep within each one’s health facility and in humanitarian missions nationally and abroad. The course encourages the acquisition of knowledge about diverse cultures to enhance students’ ability to adapt their attitude providing health care with equity according to the cultural singularities of each patient.
The winning project in the category of Enabling Students was The course "Fundamentals of Physical Education" presented by Isaac José Pérez López from the Physical Education and Sports Department at the University of Granada.
The innovative nature of the developed project is found, mainly, in the three pillars on which it was built, which are very significant for the current students: fiction, social networks, and games (board or video games). For this, a gamification project was designed, taking advantage of the principles and motivational elements of games, and relying on social networks to increase students’ motivation. Students are at the centre of the proposal, providing them with decision-making capacity, autonomy, and the possibility to adapt the experience to their learning rhythms and needs (giving them, for example, freedom in regard to the formats of the challenges or the challenge’s deadlines). To build the project’s narrative (a key aspect in gamification) advantage of a film reference, specifically, the popular TV show called “Money Heist” was taken. This led to the release of “La cárcel de papel (Paper Jail)”, the educational sequel to the most successful Spanish series worldwide.