“Our students need to learn to solve complex problems”

The Discovery Learning Program, fruit of a long-term educational reflection process, is taking shape today. For several years, various School stakeholders – professors, administration, deans, and teaching staff – have volunteered their time and shared their ideas to find solutions for the lack of time and space availability for EPFL’s practical laboratory courses. As the renovation of the ME building, where many of the new teaching laboratories will be located, nears completion, Thomas Rizzo, Dean of the School of Basic Sciences, shares his vision of the project with us.

- You’re among those who initiated this program…

This dates back to 2004, the year when I became dean of the School of Basic Sciences. Didier Trono, at that time Dean of the School of Life Sciences, and I were thinking about how we could bring our disciplines together and create more cross-disciplinary exchange. That’s how the idea was born. After that, a number of other professors got on board to develop it and define the academic content. Today it has become truly a group project. It’s maybe even the most transversal and bottom-up project that EPFL has ever undertaken.

- What motivated you back then?

There were three sources of motivation. The first was the state of our laboratories; they were dated and lacked state of the art equipment; they really needed to be renovated. The second was the lack of space available for laboratory instruction in the new life sciences building. Finally there was a willingness and interest in recognizing the reality of the interdisciplinary dimension of scientific problems, and in offering our students the right sets of tools to tackle these problems in all their complexity.

- Why is it important to break down the barriers between disciplines these days?

Because in reality, problems don’t come with labels like “100% chemistry” or “100% physics”. And we want our students, who will have to deal with this reality in the professional workplace, to be capable of solving them. An important part of our new program is to encourage interdisciplinary projects, in which students from different sections work together, each bringing his or her own expertise to the endeavor. In this way they’ll learn to work with scientists in other disciplines, to understand the differences in jargon, approaches, and techniques. But to be able to do this, they must first of all be excellent in their own subject area! That’s why we need to maintain our primary priority on providing a solid educational foundation in every discipline.

- Up until recently we were still talking about the Teaching Bridge. Why was this abandoned?

In 2010, the architect commissioned with renovating the ME building proposed the Teaching Bridge concept, which captured Patrick Aebischer’s interest. The architecture itself was very enticing, but it wasn’t well adapted to what we wanted to do and to the reality of our needs. Although the building has changed, the academic project, as a background concept, is still the same: create laboratories by subject area, then allow various degrees of overlap between disciplines, from simple collaborations to full-fledged interdisciplinary projects.

- In the future, will education favor practical laboratory courses over lecture courses and theory?

I think that theory, computer simulation, and practical courses are all equally important and complement one another. I don’t think that education will fundamentally change. But we need to think about the way in which our students learn – will they do so with the same tools? Will they read books like they used to? And so on. We need to adapt to who they are today. When you learn something by experimentation – discovering it for yourself by touching and testing it, by noticing directly the consequences of this or that manipulation, by starting over again differently if it doesn’t work – you learn in a different way than if you simply discuss it. That’s why we chose this name, the Discovery Learning Labs.

- Are the Discovery Learning Labs part of the same evolution we’re seeing with MOOCs?

The two are complementary. MOOCs, like our new way of organizing laboratory courses, are not designed to reduce contact between professors and students, but rather to provide a different kind of contact. There will be fewer lecture-hall courses, but certainly more interactions in the laboratory. The theory and experimental parts of a course will be more closely connected. For example, in the middle of a laboratory course, the professor could gather the students to explain a particular theoretical point. MOOCs, lecture courses, and laboratory courses are all tools, designed or re-designed to be more flexible, adaptable, and reconfigurable, thus giving professors more freedom in how they can best educate their students.

Discovery Learning Program: http://discoverylearningprogram.epfl.ch/page-97601-fr.html

The Flash online: http://medias.epfl.ch/flash