Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR courses

Guidance and resources to support EPICUR course development, cc-by-sa

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Guest Lectures

Guest Lectures

Why include guest lectures?

The idea is to increase the students' opportunities to broaden their perspective, both academically and in terms of life experience. This is why including guest lecturers adds value for the students. It allows them to learn from diverse approaches to the topic being taught and gain practical experience in the field. However, exposure alone is not sufficient if the students are not prepared to critically learn and ask questions about it.

Finding Guest lecturers and guest lecturing opportunities

If you are interested in finding EPICUR colleagues who could offer guest lectures or if you are interested in guest lecturing, here are two ways to get started. A good place to start is to register with CoTeachConnector – here’s how you can do that: 

  1. Follow this link https://s.kit.edu/epictlc and click on your institution’s logo to access the EPICUR Inter-University Campus (EIUC).
  2. Click on the EPICUR Centre for International Teaching & Learning (EPiC TLC) logo on the homepage of the EPICUR Inter-University Campus.
  3. On the EPiC TLC, select the Let’s Connect! section. In the right hand menu, click on the CoTeachConnector. Add your details to the database and see if there’s a colleague already listed who can offer what you are looking for.

To access the CoTeachConnector, you can also use this direct link (after login to the EIUC): https://learn.epicur.education/goto_epicur_dcl_2372_25.html

Alternatively, contact your EPICUR Institutional Coordinator (listed at the bottom of this page) and ask them to help you find a guest lecturer or a guest lecturing opportunity. 

Remember, Erasmus+ funding can finance short visits to other EPICUR universities, making in-person guest lecturing possible. Contact your institution’s Erasmus+ coordinator to find out more.

5 key points about including guest lectures in in-person or online courses

  1. Guest lecturers enhance the learning experience by bringing fresh perspectives, real-world expertise, and diverse viewpoints to the core curriculum. This infusion of knowledge and insight adds dynamism and engagement to the learning process.
  2. Increase Student Engagement.Guest lecturers, especially those with industry stories or innovative research, tend to capture student interest and increase participation, making the class more interactive and motivating.
  3. A guest lecturer can better bridge Theory and Practicebecause they can provide practical insights or case studies, offering students a more comprehensive understanding of their field.
  4. In the case of online classes, lecturers can bring flexibility in delivery and wider variety of expertise and experienceas experts from around the world can participate without travel constraints.
  5. In-person lectures provide more direct interaction and the possibility for networking, such as discussing internship opportunities. In person lectures often support more sustained student engagement with the topic as the visiting lecturer is present.

Guest lectures in practice

Boosting the quality and quantity of questions of the students in guest lectures
Civil and Architectural Engineering, SDU

Watch the 5 minute video where Alberto Innocenti explains his approach.

Studio 3 – Sustainable Urban Design and Planning is an interactive course in which students apply the knowledge gained in previous propaedeutic courses and dive into a spatial planning simulation based on a real case study. The studio offers a dynamic learning experience with various activities, including frontal pills or inputs, seminars with invited experts presenting relevant themes related to the project to broaden students' perspectives, and both formal and informal peer-to-peer dialogue and feedback.

In order to make the most of the seminar within the limited time frame, it is important to encourage students to ask relevant questions that stimulate critical thinking. To help with this, I designed and implemented an approach to stimulate and support students’ question formulation.

I prepared a short video lecture on critical thinking and Socratic questioning to provide students with the necessary theoretical foundation.

During each guest lecture, I invited students to work in pairs and co-develop relevant questions. They posted their questions on an online whiteboard that had already been prepared with a Socratic questioning guide to help them co-develop their questions for the guest lecturer. The student pairs then asked the guest lecturer their questions and learning through dialogue was underway.

This approach radically changed the questioning dynamics in the class. Prior to the introduction of Socratic questioning and the inclusion of time for students to co-formulate relevant questions for a guest lecturer, there were maybe one or two students asking questions, but once the intervention was implemented, the student pairs asked up to 20 questions of each guest lecturer. This greatly improved the students dialogic engagement and learning from the guest lecturer and enhanced the experience for the visiting lecturer.

Links to resources for including guest lectures in classes

Guidance from the University of Illinois on Guest lecturers in the online environment

References

  • King, A. (1990). Enhancing Peer Interaction and Learning in the Classroom Through Reciprocal Questioning. Source: American Educational Research Journal, 27(4), 664–687.
  • Katsara, O., & de Witte, K. (2019). How to use Socratic questioning in order to promote adults’ self-directed learning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 51(1), 109–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/02660830.2018.1526446
  • Krogstie, Birgit Rognebakke; Krogstie, John (2018) Guest lectures in IT education - Recommendations based on an empirical study. NOKOBIT - Norsk konferanse for organisasjoners bruk av informasjonsteknologi Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2579400
  • Reem A. Alebaikan (2016) Online and face-to-face guest lectures: graduate students' perceptions. Teaching in Higher Education DOI: 18538/lthe.v13.n2.229

Internationalising the Curriculum

Author(s)

This resource sheet has been co-written or written by

  • Alberto Innocenti (SDU)
  • Donna Hurford (SDU)

Related Resource Sheets

Next steps

If you need further support with developing your course, please contact your local teaching support unit.
If you need further information on offering your course for EPICUR, please contact your EPICUR institutional coordinator.

Local teaching support units

EPICUR Institutional Coordinators

Adam Mickiewicz University
Karolina Choczaj
karmench@amu.edu.pl

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Nikos Kouloussis
nikoul@agro.auth.gr

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Michael Zacherle
zacherle@kit.edu

University of Amsterdam
Tiffany Boersma
t.a.boersma@uva.nl

Universität Freiburg
Charlotte Langowski
charlotte.langowski@zv.uni-freiburg.de

Université de Haute-Alsace
Léa Ziri
lea.ziri@uha.fr

Universität für Bodenkultur Wien
Nicolas Fries
nicolas.fries@boku.ac.at

University of Southern Denmark
Ida Thøstesen
ilt@sdu.dk

University of Strasbourg
Pascale Nachez
pnachez@unistra.fr

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Further use as OER explicitly permitted:
This Resource Sheet within the Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses was created by Alberto Innocenti and Donna Hurford, University of Southern Denmark.
Please attribute according to TASLL rule as follows: Guest Lectures (Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses), by Alberto Innocenti and Donna Hurford, University of Southern Denmark. Any icons included are protected by copyright, © The Noun Project, used with permission.
License: This work and its contents are – unless otherwise stated – licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 . 

Last edited: 23. Jun 2025, 09:05, Hutz-Nierhoff, Dorthe [dh1076@rz.uni-freiburg.de]