The vice-presidency wishes to strengthen the use of digital resources in teaching basic polytechnic skills (math, physics, computational thinking) and core concepts in science and engineering (e.g. control systems and fluid dynamics for mechanical engineers; electromechanical conversion and electronics for microtechnics).

New. AI Apps. CEDE is exploring the use of generative AI technologies in education. Several scenarios are under development: supporting assistants in answering questions in discussion forums, producing hints to help students in exercises, generating quizzes and exercises based on video lectures. You can request some funding to prepare material and resources (e.g. share your exercises and solutions), as well as to running a pilot in your class (e.g. extra human checking of answers generated by AI).

Automatic Graders. Automatic grading of Jupyter notebooks and programming assignments allows to provide quick and detailed feedback to students. The DRIL fund can support you to add grading capabilities to  programming exercises (writing unit tests, defining feedback, etc.). For Jupyter notebooks, we are supporting Otter Grader on our centralised Jupyter Hub platform. For other forms of programming assignments, we also maintain a Moodle plugin that can forward the submissions to a  grading infrastructure maintained by the labs or schools.

Jupyter Notebooks. Jupyter notebooks are used to demonstrate concepts in class, to engage students in interactive extercises, as well as to create interactive textbooks. Have a look at the notebooks that have been developed by your colleagues at EPFL: https://go.epfl.ch/explore-our-educational-notebooks.

We are running a centralised Jupyter Hub for education at which allows students to run Jupyter notebooks without installing any software, directly from the browser. It supports Python, Octave, R, Javascript, and other specialised environments. There is also a Moodle integration to facilitate the management of notebook based assignments.

Open your courses. To augment EPFL’s open educational resources offering, the DRIL fund supports teachers in adapting / transforming their existing course material. You can obtain funding to hire up to one month of teaching assistant to help you adapt the course material, e.g. redraw figures, obtain copyright clearance, find open alternatives to replace copyrighted material, etc. The resulting material has to bear a Creative Commons Licence and be made available freely on Moodle (with guest access) or other open channels.

Create MOOCs and course material from your class recordings. Some classroom or home video recordings are of very good quality (audio, video, easy to segment) and can serve as a basis to produce a MOOC and accompanying pedagogical resources without much additional video recordings.

The DRIL fund can for example support you in developing quizzes and assignments to augment the existing video material and transform your course into a fully fledged online course to be published on edX or Coursera as well as on the local courseware.epfl.ch platform.

Be creative. In addition to MOOCs and Jupyter notebooks, we invite you to develop digital tools that provide more, quicker and richer feedback to students, that help them solve complex problems, give them the possibility to run experiments and link domain knowledge with a computational approach.

Application. We encourage you to coordinate the application with other colleagues who might benefit from the same developments and to discuss your project with your section director. We also recommend that you contact the Center for Digital Education (Patrick Jermann) to assist you in preparing your project application.

Next call for proposal: March 31st 2025. Download the submission form.

Running projects

Type	Title	Contact
Spring 2024
Notebooks	Python large codebase for teaching	Alexandre Alahi
Notebooks	Educational Python laboratories in optimization	Michel Bierlaire
Exercises	Augmented exercises with QR codes	Nicolas Grandjean
MOOC	ENV-101: Durabilité	Jérôme Chappelaz & Siroune Der Sarkissian
Fall 2023
Simulation	Digital Microfabrication Augmented Reality (AR)	Jürgen Brugger
MOOC	Introduction to optimization on smooth manifolds	Nocolas Boumal
Spring 2023
Notebooks	Digital resources for context-based teaching of Matrix Analysis for Engineers	Pierre Vandergheynst
Video	Video podcast on digital ethics	Johan Rochel
Grader	Infrastructure for Automatic Graders in Moodle	Barbara Jobstmann & Jamila Sam
Fall 2022
Tool	Online Teaching Tools for Making & Prototyping	Josie Hughes
Tool	Interactive simulations for first-year physics (mechanics)	Sylvain Bréchet
Notebooks	Digital Cleanroom Notebooks	Jürgen Brugger
Spring 2022
Notebooks	Polyglot notebooks and online lecture notes for core statistics courses	Mats Stensrud, Matthieu Wilhelm, Yoav Zemel
Tool	A virtual lab for galactic dynamics	Yves Revaz
Tool	Proving and disproving correctness of programming assignments	Viktor Kuncak, Dragana Molovancevic
Tool	Digital tools for scalable and blended design thinking activities	Denis Gillet
Fall 2021
Notebooks	Jupyter Notebooks for Analyse numérique	Marco Picasso
Tool	Virtual spectroscopy laboratory	Mounir Mensi, Berend Smit, Kevin Maik Jablonka, Luc Patiny
MOOC	Advanced Timber Plate Structural Design	Aryan Rezaei Rad, Petras Vestartas, Yves Weinand
Spring 2021
MOOC	Warmup for EPFL	Simone Deparis, CePro
MOOC	Sustainability assessment of urban systems	Claudia Binder, Susan Mühlemeier
Tool	Interactive simulations for introductory astrophysics	Frédéric Courbin
MOOC	Digitalization in Humanitarian Action	Klaus Schönenberger
Fall 2020
Notebook	Jupyter web applications for quantum simulations	Giovanni Pizzi, Dou Du
Notebook	FeedbackNow – Automatic grading and formative feedback for image processing laboratories	Daniel Sage, Pol del Aguila Pla
Notebook	Introduction to Machine Learning for Engineers	Alexandre Alahi
Notebook	Interactive Virtual Demonstrations for Signals and Systems	Michaël Unser
Notebook	Digital tools for structural mechanics and visualization of experiments and failure surfaces	Dimitrios Lignos
MOOC	Statisticalphysics IV	Tobias Kippenberg
MOOC	Parallelism and Concurrency in Scala 3	Martin Odersky
MOOC	New Space Economy	Volker Gass, Jean-Paul Kneib
Fall 2019
Notebook	Notebooks for Finite Elements of Solids and Structures	Guillaume Anciaux, Jean-François Molinari
Notebook	Computational Thinking	Alexandre Alahi
Tool	Self-Assessment for Mathematics	François Genoud, Guido Burmeister
Tool	Speakup – MCQ questions	Denis Gillet
Spring 2019
Notebook	Understanding Electromagnetism through Interactive Learning and Computational Thinking	Christophe Galland, Cécile Hébert
Notebook	Coherent treatment of core concepts in fluid mechanics and heat transfer via a multimodal representation using Jupyter notebooks	François Gallaire, Sophia Haussener, Karen Mulleners, Giulia Tagliabue, Tobias Schneider
Notebook	Computational thinking tools for solid state physics courses	Oleg Yazyev, Henrik Ronnow
Tool	Open-ended project design companion	Marc Laperrouza, Marius Aeberli
MOOC	Innovative Governance of Large Urban Systems	Matthias Finger
MOOC	Advanced CECAM Class: Path Integral Methods for Quantum Thermodynamics and Dynamics	Ignacio Pagonbarraga, Michele Ceriotti
Tool	FROG – collaborative learning in practice	Pierre Dillenbourg
Fall 2018
Notebook	Notebooks for signal processing.	Paolo Prandoni
Notebook	Interactive Linear Algebra.	Daniel Kressner
Notebook	Computational Classroom Demonstrations and Problem sets for Materials Science and Engineering teaching.	Véronique Michaud
Notebook	Jupyter Notebooks for first-year physics.	Cécile Hébert
MOOC	Creation of a MOOC for the course “Information, Computation, and Communication”.	Olivier Lévêque, Martin Rajman