(written for CS teaching mailing no. 16 of 11 July)
As of 1 July, I will leave the U. Twente after almost 30 years (first as student, then as PhD student, finally as staff member) for a new challenge at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. I am proud to announce that I will join Radboud University’s faculty of science as professor of Federated Search.
I was privileged to teach in a world that changed a lot since I became an assistant professor (in 2001). Today, university-level courses are no longer taught for the privileged few at universities in developed countries. They are now freely available to anyone online via platforms like Coursera, edX, FutureLearn and on social media, such as on YouTube. Over the last 18 years, I tried to stimulate students to find additional study material online. In return I tried to contribute to the online study material by publishing my teaching material for students to use and for colleagues to share (my Canvas courses are still entirely publicly available) and by using novel social media like UT Mastodon (https://mastodon.utwente.nl).
In my years at the UT, I enjoyed promoting critical thinking by letting students actively put theory to practice, instead of letting students passively absorb knowledge. I particularly enjoyed developing the MSc course Managing Big Data with Maarten Fokkinga and Robin Aly (later perfected by Doina Bucur) where students analysed terabytes of data on a large Hadoop cluster. I enjoyed developing the BSc module Data & Information with Klaas Sikkel, Maurice van Keulen and Luís Ferreira Pires, where we let students work in agile teams, including daily stand-ups, sprint review meetings, and sprint backlogs. I also very much liked running the MSc course Information Retrieval with Paul van der Vet, Theo Huibers and Dolf Trieschnigg, where students used open source search engines and actively contributed to our research. Some of that work was published, and in such cases, students presented their work at international workshops or conferences.
Saying goodbye to Twente is harder than I expected. But remember, Nijmegen is close by: Feel free to contact me. As for PhD students, I intend to continue to be an active contributor to the courses of the Dutch research school SIKS: I hope to see you there.
Goodbye everybody!