Teaching formats in the doctoral cursus
The Lemanic Neuroscience Doctoral School (LNDS) wants to provide students with broad background knowledge in neuroscience irrespective of their actual thesis topic. That is, we aim to offer courses and training events ranging from cellular-molecular to cognitive-clinical and in silico neurosciences. Since our inter-university doctoral program hosts students from Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg please consider offering blocked teaching sessions to avoid unnecessary and time-consuming commuting for students. Please see here for information on the currently available teaching events.
Courses preferentially take the format of:
• Events that take place on several days of one week
• Events that take place once a week over several (likely consecutive) weeks
• Doctoral school courses should have a session duration of at least 3-4h
Several types of teaching events are invited:
• Courses: Consist of lectures and/or demonstrations and/or hands-on sessions. Courses can be given by one or several teachers. The evaluation of student’s learning achievements is obligatory to grant doctoral school credits (please see guideline section below). Evaluation forms are available.
• Tutorials: Consist of a series of discussion built around a global neuroscience topic (e.g. “Views on the influence of grad school on brain performance in PhD candidates”) usually spanning 5 sessions with 2-3h each. Local tutor(s) are asked to give a small introduction to the global topic, define subtopics (e.g. “Influence on memory”, “Influence on survival in the outside world” etc.) and provide students with 2-3 papers of interest for each tutorial session. Students prepare these papers for discussion with the tutor(s), and are evaluated upon their active participation to the discussion, as well as their ability to analyze and synthesize information from the scientific papers. Ideally, not more than 10-12 students participate in a tutorial to foster efficient interaction. Evaluation forms are available.
• Workshops based on local symposia or conferences: For LNDS students, the participation to local symposia or national conferences usually warrants entries on a “seminar sheet” (12 entries = 1 ECTS) as these events do not provide the possibility to assess students’ learning achievements. However, the valuation of full school credits for such events can easily be re-discussed given that symposium/ conference organizers provide students with the possibility of either
o discussing 2-3 event-relevant papers in a post-event session, or
o submitting an essay containing a critical discussion of scientific outcomes presented at the event.
• Journal clubs: Please see here for more information.