Cover letter

12. About me

I use a student-centered flipped classroom blended-learning model to deliver my courses. The words in this phrase and their order are important:

• First and foremost it is student-centered, providing flexible learning resources that enable the students to choose when and where to carry out their learning activities

• It uses flipped classroom methods, releasing the time needed to deliver presentations, and reusing it in the form of active learning activities, including student-led discussions and assignments

• Last and least, it is blended learning because I alternate two weeks on-campus with two weeks online (the full learning content is available online and mainly consists of short video lectures and discussions)

This model was born out of passion and need. Before taking up my current position as Professor of Digital Electronics in Norway, I was vice-president for pedagogical affairs at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP). I created FEUP’s Teaching and Learning Lab in 2008 (LEA, Laboratório de Ensino e Aprendizagem: https://fe.up.pt/~lea/), introduced the Google Apps for Education programme in FEUP in 2013, and was from 2005 to 2011 the Head of the University’s panel that awarded the “U.PORTO e-Learning Excellence Prize”. Since the early 1990s I participated in several national and international projects addressing educational technologies, and published their results in various journals and conferences.

In 2013 I decided to apply for a full time position at the Buskerud University College, BUC (now University of South-Eastern Norway, USN), with which I had worked in various international projects since the early 1990s, and which I visited yearly to deliver a one week course on digital test technologies. Commuting between Porto and Kongsberg created the need for blended-learning delivery, and my background experience provided the tools and the knowledge required to implement a teaching and learning model that would make it work. The result was the first implementation of the student-centered flipped classroom blended-learning model presented here.

Then in 2014 I accepted an invitation to take up a 4-year role as vice-rector at the University of Porto, in charge of quality assurance (QA) and IT infrastructure (BUC kindly gave me a 4-year leave of absence for this purpose, and I lectured a single bachelor course once a year during this period). The student-centered flipped classroom part of the model remained intact, but blended-learning delivery was replaced by an introductory week on-campus followed by all remaining weeks online. My responsibilities in QA and IT at Porto, and particularly the coordination of U.Porto’s quality assurance certification process (which was unconditionally approved for a 6-year period in 2017), raised my awareness to the importance of pedagogical reflection as a tool to assess the effectiveness of teaching and learning technologies.

Finally in 2018 I resumed my Professor position in Norway, and returned to the original student-centered flipped classroom blended-learning model. The initial implementation of this model, its use in blended learning mode and in one week on-campus plus remaining weeks online, as well as its technological evolution by integrating further tools and migrating from Google Sites to Canvas, provided the main plot for the story that unfolds in this document.