Reseach-oriented teaching..Is it possible?

• To be honest I do not know the answer...here are some thoughts (vaguely formed)....

Research and teaching follow separate paths, this is the standard recipe that most of the university curricula have been developed and based on my work experience in Bath University and Imperial College London and as a student in Greece, there is not really room for blending these, apart from the final year student's project which resembles a pure research activity. This is somehow deep in the mentality of the institutions and academic community and their aims. Moreover, in many universities nowadays there is a clear separation between researchers and teachers. If you are a researcher you are focused mainly on your scientific work and on preparing grant applications while being a teaching staff, you need to prepare the new generation of efficient employees. In other cases, a lecturer has to excel both in teaching and research which is also too demanding and frustrating. A lecturer has such a load of work related to preparing presentations, tutoring, supervisions and coursework corrections that basically there is no time to perform research. Over the years many lecturers repeat over and over the same content following the same ''teaching formula''. This is also related to the restrictions and policies (both of the government and university) e.g. whether changes are allowed in the content and how easily this can be implemented in addition to the limited time available. This inflexibility and high demands, of course, can deprive the lecturer's ability to evolve scientifically in conjunction with a poor teaching performance.

In the UK (from my personal experience) I know that there is a clear policy about classifying between teaching-intensive universities and elite research-oriented ones. In many cases, teaching members of the teaching-oriented faculties are excluded from applying for research project and grants based on their contract agreement (which I find it totally preposterous). In universities like Cambridge, for example the lecturing period in the maths department is extremely short e.g. 1.5 month and after that students and lecturers are devoted to more research oriented activities and personal tutoring. However this is not true for the majority of the institutions.

Now, how I could introduced a more research related activities and content in the units that I have taught. This is not straight-forward to answer. First, this requires flexibility from the curriculum rules to allow something like that to take place. True research takes times and actually it requires restructuring the whole curriculum in order to meet these requirements.

Since, as teachers we are allowed to intervene with the ''how we teach a unit'' and not with the content, I think we can do little to change the vision. Second, I believe that is that this is very related to the discipline or field. For example, in mathematics or electrical engineering, it feels much more difficult to introduce the students to more advanced topics in an undergraduate level. Of course, some activities to develop primitive research skill would be beneficial even though often is absent. Third, research has to face the unknown or unexpected. This can be good because it can expand our students horizons and abilities. But how we can evaluate our students' performance in such a framework? What do we expect from our students? Do they need to produce new knowledge (novelty) or just to simulate a research process? I think at the moment the most realistic plan (for me), is, for example in a programming course (that I am related to), to assign some tasks that require further investigation and thinking from the students' side, explain the students how to prepare a scientific article (possibly ask them to write a coursework in a scientific article format) and present some newer ideas and concepts towards the end of the unit when they have already understood the basics.

I think progressive introduction to state-of-the art topics and allowing students to actively participate (from the early years) is desired and will increase their motivation but it requires a whole reformulation of a department's vision. For example, by engaging students to public scientific talks, teaching early enough how to prepare a scientific report, how to prepare questionnaires and perform research activities in general (by working in Labs) and this requires very good coordination and tuning between the units and the academic staff.