Education

Assistant Professor develops bachelor-level course as part of teacher training programme

Kristian Barrett has just completed DTU’s assistant professor training programme. The programme has led him to devise a special examination format for a new bachelor-level course.

Kristian Barrett has developed the new bachelor-level course together with his colleagues, Carlos Acevedo-Rocha and Birgitte Zeuner. Photo: Linnea Lundberg.

Friday 25 September 2026

Linnea Lundberg

Teaching and assessing at a time when artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly can present challenges. Artificial intelligence is, in fact, a double-edged sword, according to Kristian Barrett from DTU Bioengineering. It is unrivalled when it comes to sifting through vast databases of, for example, research articles, but if you do not process the output, you are doing yourself a disservice.

“Artificial intelligence is both the best and the worst thing that has happened to us researchers and students,” says Kristian Barrett, continuing:

“It enables us to map out and identify similarities in vast amounts of data, but if you let it write your exam reports without revising them yourself afterwards, you won’t learn anything.”

Therefore, Kristian Barrett had no doubt about what he wanted to focus on when he began DTU’s teacher training programme for assistant professors. He wanted to develop a course in which artificial intelligence plays a secondary role and where the students’ ability to reason and evaluate is central.

“During the programme, I was introduced to the concept active learning, which is based on the premise that students learn better when they actively engage with the material they are studying. I have taken this a step further and used it to improve the students' ‘conceptual understanding’,” explains Kristian Barrett.

He elaborates:

“If you master conceptual understanding, you are able to link new knowledge to existing knowledge – in this case, research findings – and apply your knowledge across different fields of research, because you can identify connections and argue for them objectively.”

Facts

About DTU’s teacher training programme for assistant professors, UDTU

  • UDTU (University Teacher Training Programme) is DTU’s teacher training programme for assistant professors.
  • It is a compulsory teaching training programme for assistant professors and academic staff at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) who are to act as course coordinators or seek appointment as associate professors.
  • During the programme, assistant professors learn to design courses, engage students, utilize feedback and organize examinations specifically within the technical and natural science disciplines. The programme has a particular focus on engineering didactics. 
  • Throughout the programme, assistant professors are introduced to various learning theories and strategies, but the most important element is the participants’ own contribution: either designing their own course based on their newly acquired knowledge or developing an existing course further.
  • The programme lasts two semesters, and at the end of it, participants present their (re)designed courses and their experiences with them. At this event, a winner is selected for the best Capstone project poster, which is awarded to the participant who, according to the other participants, has presented their (re)designed course in the best poster.
  • Kristian Barrett received the Best Capstone Poster Award on September 1, 2026.

New technology, new examination format

The course developed by Kristian Barrett, Carlos Acevedo-Rocha, and Birgitte Zeuner is a bachelor’s-level course in bioinformatics. The course involves mapping and classifying proteins into different groups – known as tree diagrams – based on their respective properties, such as the ability to break down sugar. And when it comes to doing this, artificial intelligence is a useful tool. But that is not enough.

“The students need to map the properties of proteins that have not previously been described in detail, and they can only succeed in doing so if they familiarize themselves with which proteins the given protein resembles. And they can only do that by reviewing for themselves the research findings based on that very protein or a protein that resembles it,” explains Kristian Barrett.

The oral examination has two parts. First, the examiner and external examiner ask the student a question about the report, that the student does not know in advance.

Part two consists of 30 questions on conceptual understanding that students know in advance. However, they only need to answer one, so they draw lots to randomly decide which one it’s going to be.

All these measures have been introduced to test the students’ ability to understand concepts and identify connections, i.e. to assess whether they master conceptual understanding or not.

“Running the bachelor’s course has been incredibly intense and educational, and my colleagues and I have received really positive feedback from the students. The course will be offered again in spring 2027, and I hope it will be just as big a success the second time round,” says Kristian Barrett.

He adds:

“I firmly believe that AI is here to stay, and almost all the students I meet use it, so there’s no turning back now. We’ll have to adapt our teaching and exams accordingly, otherwise we’ll end up training engineers who can’t understand concepts or think innovatively on their own, because they’ve tried to get AI to do it for them.”

Contact

Kristian Barrett

Kristian Barrett Assistant Professor Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine

Carlos G. Acevedo-Rocha

Carlos G. Acevedo-Rocha Senior Researcher Biotechnology Research Institute for the Green Transition

Birgitte Zeuner

Birgitte Zeuner Associate Professor Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine