Teaching

Thirty-five academic years at four institutions, some forty subjects and courses in three languages, and since 2010 one course taught the way I would have wanted to be taught.

The record below comes from the itemised teaching certificates in the dossier for the chair and from the later abbreviated CV. The timeline reads left to right by academic year; each row is a subject, grouped by institution and centre; the colour is the language of instruction, the thickness the credits taught that year. Hover or focus a bar for its details. The full list follows as tables.

Timeline of subjects

Termodinamika eta Fisika Estatistikoa

A twelve-credit, full-year course in the third year of the Physics degree and the Double Degree in Physics and Electronic Engineering, taught in Basque to sixty or seventy students a year. It is the course named in my chair and the one I have coordinated since 2010. I introduced thermodynamics and its neighbouring subjects in Basque at this university and prepared the first complete set of materials for them, so the course also carries that history. The way it runs has been stable for a decade and is documented in public:

• A daily class log (egunkaria): what was done in every session, published as it happens, so nobody has to guess what the course expects.
• Short tests (azterketatxoak) through the year rather than one examination, with a public rubric and worked examples of how answers are marked.
• Concept maps and reading maps for both semesters, so the structure of the subject is visible before the details.
• Jupyter notebooks in Basque as the working documents: derivations, exercises from Zemansky and the students’ own computations in one place.
• MinervaLab, the interactive simulation laboratory for first-order phase transitions and the van der Waals fluid, used in class for the part students find hardest.

The course material lives in yearly GitHub repositories. The bachelor’s theses that come out of it, the ones in progress and the proposals for the coming year are on igartua / gral-tfg, together with the preparation manual I wrote for students starting a thesis.

Subjects taught

University of the Basque Country (EHU)

UNED, Associated Centre of Bizkaia (tutor-professor)

Basque Summer University (UEU), Iruñea summer courses

Université Moulay Ismaïl, Errachidia, Morocco

Textbooks and teaching material

Twenty entries with ISBN in the dossier: three university-level textbooks and seven books or extended teaching materials for undergraduates as author or translator, and thirteen more as translator, reviser or contributor, mostly in Basque, which made it possible to teach the physics curriculum entirely in that language. Among them the translation and scientific revision of Fishbane, Gasiorowicz and Thornton’s Physics for Scientists and Engineers (2008; two volumes, 2014), the Elhuyar encyclopaedic dictionary of science and technology (2009), Mekanika Estatistikoa and Forma eta Fluxua for the Basque Summer University, the Fisika Praktikak laboratory manual, the Fisikaz Blai booklets, Iraunkortasuna, the Lur physics and chemistry dictionary, and the physics and chemistry textbooks for Edebé (2008–2015).

Teaching research and innovation

Eighteen teaching-innovation projects at EHU, including the one I led on the electronic laboratory notebook with Jupyter (PIE 2018–2019), and physics-education papers at CINTE 2016, CSEDU 2017, GIREP 2018 and the RSEF biennial meeting of 2019. Thirty-eight training courses, eight hundred and twenty hours in all, and the three Terminologia Sareak Ehunduz terminology programmes. Teaching evaluated in the top band of DOCENTIAZ, 82.4 and 95.7 points in 2008–2013 and 2013–2018. Coordinator of the Physics Olympiad, tutor in the tutorial action programme, and a regular at open days, the science week and the summer science campus. Since 2017, coordinator of the design and preparation of the physics examination for university entrance in the Basque Country, which has turned into a data project of its own on how the examination behaves across Spain.