Table 2 Instructional practices

Instructor-centered

Instructors deliver information (course content) without necessarily helping students understand how the components of information are related or whether they are based on students’ prior knowledge (Smith et al., 2005)

E.g., lectures, traditional assessment practices (few big exams/tests)

“So, every time there is a lot of repetition and a lot of explaining, a lot of examples, a lot of analogies…. So, there’s a lot of lecturing in that course.”

“Teaching for me is really conveying things that I have accumulated over my career. During my career, there were components that have helped me a lot and made me an expert in a certain discipline. So, I try to somehow communicate important elements of that to younger people. So, it’s really the conveying of information and, therefore, through the information, the associated skills that come with that, right? Well, nowadays of course a lot of active learning is taking over, but there’s still a lot of information that has to be somehow introduced before that.”

Student-centered

Instructors create a learning environment where students are supported in developing their own conceptual understanding in terms of extension of existing knowledge and where students have the autonomy to control their learning in collaboration with their instructor and peers (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999)

E.g., active learning practices (pair/group work, student presentations, collaboration), non-traditional assessment practices

“There is educational research showing that doing something else and then coming back to the same topic is effective in helping to consolidate knowledge in one’s memory. Basically, making students discuss and explain the material to each other—that’s very effective. That’s especially obvious in office hours when you sit with them, and they solve problems in front of you and talk. There is this aha moment for students who didn't get it. Then after talking to their classmates, they finally get it.”

“Everything else is centered around group work, they’re using the monitor, they’re using the white boards, sometimes I put up a Google Doc and have all 100 people in the room start writing into the Google Doc. I actually find it really interesting because they come up with some stuff like wow, I didn’t think of that. I actually enjoy teaching like that because it's as if I'm not controlling the class anymore the same way that I would if I was giving a narrative lecture.”