The Educational Development Unit is pleased to welcome Emeritus Professor Gareth Jones to speak at our Perspectives in Education lecture series, dedicated to wider discussion of education.

Competence and understanding: helping students to achieve both

Degree programme design starts by setting goals. Among these, perhaps the most important are that students should achieve competence in and also understanding of the field of study.  But these two complementary aspects of education are difficult to define and also difficult to achieve. The academic level aimed at is even harder to define. This talk will give a Pan-European perspective on these issues (mainly in the context of physics) and will include some results from educational investigations as well as comments on recent developments in European cooperation in Higher Education.

Gareth Jones is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics at Imperial College and has wide experience of degree programme design and of involvement with networks of European universities and of several European-wide educational projects.