Academics from Minho and Granada win the second edition of the Arqus Teaching Excellence Awards

The second edition of the Arqus Teaching Excellence Awards has successfully concluded with the selection of two new teaching best practices in the categories of “enabling research-based teaching” and “enabling students”. The promoters of both projects and winners of this edition were announced during the third Arqus Annual Conference held at the University of Graz last week.

The Arqus Teaching Excellence Awards is an initiative promoted by the Arqus Teaching Innovation leaders that 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.

This year, the award for the most innovative project in the category of enabling research-based teaching went to the course “Humanitarian Medicine – Thinking Global, Acting Local” developed by Margarida Correia-Neves and Jorge Hernâni-Eusébio from the School of Medicine at the University of Minho, in collaboration with the academics Beatriz Costa, Carolina Lopes, Carolina Martins, Célia Araújo, Duarte Baptista, and Nuno Madureira.

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 Master’s Programme in Medicine offered by this university. The training aims at equipping students with the knowledge and skills needed to act in a global and intercultural world, both at the doorstep within each one’s health facility and in humanitarian missions nationally and abroad. It offers an overall understanding of diverse cultures enhancing students’ to provide 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” developed by Isaac José Pérez López, Professor at the Physical Education and Sports Department at the University of Granada.

The innovative nature of the above 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’ engagement. 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), an 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.

Have a look at the video of the awards ceremony that took place during the Annual Conference and the presentation of the winning projects by the awarded academics from the Universities of Granada and Minho.

Professor Isaac José Pérez also prepared a special presentation of his course “Fundamental of Physical Education” than can be seen here: