The Rector’s Impulse Fund

Aim

The aim is to support innovative short-term projects to stimulate and improve teaching.

In 2024/2025 funding will be provided to promote the use of the Moodle question type STACK throughout the ETH. This will support our teaching staff both in giving feedback more efficiently during the semester (formative assessment) and lighten the burden of grading in the exam session (summative assessment). Special attention is given to service courses with high student numbers that use calculations in maths or in applied subjects: STACK can deal with numbers, formulas, units and significant figures!

The requirements and criteria of the call are published Download here (PDF, 132 KB).

Deadline for applications is December 31, 2024 to stack@math.ethz.ch

For questions you can reach out to the project leader Meike Akveld: meike.akveld@math.ethz.ch

“Finding ideas for innovations is challenging. I am very pleased to support forward-looking impulses and visions through the Rector's Impulse Fund.”

Adrian Weiss

In addition to his Foundation for the Promotion of Research at Swiss Universities and Universities of Applied Sciences, Adrian Weiss supports innovative teaching projects with an annual donation to the Rector, Günther Dissertori.

Funded projects in previous funding cycles

Enlarged view: Historical book excerpt and JupyterNotebook for text recognition — With the JuypterNotebooks, the students can, among other things, comprehend in detail and adapt the text recognition from scanned historical documents.

Digital methods in the teaching of architectural history. Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke, Dr. Olya Nikolaeva, D-ARCH. The JupyterNotebooks implemented with the funding were used in a first year course to familiarise students with tools for indexing architectural history contexts based on historical image and text sources.

Enlarged view: FORESEE Integrated development environment and embedded hardware — The online environment allows online programming of the hardware, monitoring of the hardware status and online code revision and feedback.

FORESEE: Feedback for Embedded Systems Education Dr. Michele Magno, D-ITET The browser-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) developed by the Center for Project-Based Learning supports students in deepening their skills in programming embedded systems. Code implementations and interactions with the hardware can be performed and tracked simultaneously physically and online. This enables timely feedback from the supervisors for large numbers of students, even outside of lab hours.

Enlarged view: DynErdeI_Rocktypes_Diagramm — In the lecture on rock chemistry and rock formation, students visualise mineral composition datasets from different regions of the earth using JupyterNotebooks and, in addition to acquiring geology knowledge, also deepen their skills in programming and explorative data analysis.

Computational Earth Sciences: Teaching at ETH and worldwide Prof. Dr. Andreas Fichtner, Dr. Gregory De Souza, D-ERDW. In the Earth and Climate Sciences BSc programme, the basics of programming and data science are continuously incorporated and deepened in 2-3 subject-specific subjects per semester. The funding was used to finance the development of specific JupyterNotebooks, which facilitate the low-threshold embedding of active teaching elements with a reference to data by a large number of lecturers in the degree programme and beyond ETH.

Enlarged view: Lernpfade — Lecture enrolment data can be used to determine which lectures are taken by students in a particular course (centre) beforehand (left) or afterwards or at the same time (right) and with what frequency (colour code).

Expert lecturer network at D-USYS Dr. Barbara Templ, Dr. Anouk N'Guyen, D-USYS In this project, a community manager is analysing and strengthening the network of lecturers with teaching interests in data science and machine learning. She is also developing a tool that visualises student learning paths. Lecturers can thus estimate the expected prior knowledge and study programmes can include the information in curriculum planning.

Enlarged view: Visualisation of leaf area index with JuypterNotebooks — Read in and visualize (insets), interpolate, compare and explain two annual profiles of leaf area index of a meadow using JupyterNotebook with R.

A task library for the acquisition of computational competencies in Agricultural Sciences Prof. Dr. Nina Buchmann, Dr. Regine Maier, Dr. Iris Feigenwinter, D-USYS. The project initiates the development and expansion of research-related exercises and data sets in disciplinary courses in the bachelor programme. JupyterNotebooks and R are used to visualize data sets from the respective discipline, to form own hypotheses, and to question and further develop existing subject-specific understanding.

The Rector’s Impulse Fund

Aim

Funded projects in previous funding cycles

By the Rector's Impulse Fund

By innovedum in the context of the focus topics "Educational media for visualisation and simulation" and "Transferable competences":

The Rector’s Impulse Fund

Aim

Funded projects in previous funding cycles

A selection of projects from the 2022 period (embedding computational competencies)

More funded projects in the area of computational competencies

By the Rector's Impulse Fund

By innovedum in the context of the focus topics "Educational media for visualisation and simulation" and "Transferable competences":