Quality in education

The principle of the learning community is not new within BUas. Practical training company Sibelicious has based its activities on this thought for years. It is a ‘community of learners’ in which students do not only learn from a lecturer or trainer, but, most of all, from one another. What we aim for now is a ‘community of practice’, in which industry partners also play an active part. A good example is the Performatory. Every participant in such a learning community is a ‘learner’, including lecturers and industry professionals. Lecturers are no omniscient experts, but facilitators, which asks for a different approach. We are investing in training courses for lecturers and extending the number of learning communities and the number of participants from the industry.

Blended learning combines online learning with physical presence in class. It provides students with more support to develop knowledge themselves. In this way, what they are learning lands better as well. Whereas previously, for example eight lectures and an exam were offered, you now see that students have more moments in between to test where they stand and discover what aspects they still have to further develop. These tests take place, for example in the form of a game, video or quiz giving insight into the level you have acquired to date. In this way, students can determine quickly and well in time what their follow-up steps will be in the learning process. We invest in developing various methods that encourage interactive and investigative learning.

With some 7,000 students we are a small-scale higher education institute. Lecturers and tutors (study coaches) know their students by name. We consider this personal approach very valuable and it helps us get the right student in the right place. This starts as early as during their study choice process and our matching & selection procedures. These evidently focus on students finding a degree programme that suits them. Only then can students achieve optimal development and, in addition, contribute to the learning process of their fellow students. We invest in matching & selection tools and evaluate process and procedures continuously.

To help students develop their talents, we pay a great deal of attention to feedback and coaching. 
In this process, we are going to make more frequent use of student and learning analytics, which will enable us to gain more insight into our students’ development and study progress. As a result, we will be able to make adjustments in time and really help our students progress. Our main task for the coming period is to set the right preconditions. The national acceleration plan Veilig en betrouwbaar benutten van studiedata (Using study data securely and reliably) helps us to do so. We also invest in the knowledge required. We want to have this knowledge at our disposal permanently. This is a precondition to be able to use data analytics effectively for improving the quality of our education.

Building a community is not straightforward. A very important aspect of community building is being visible for one another on a campus that offers the right facilities. We have already noticed that a lot can be achieved in a short period of time; the initiative of Clubs@BUas is a good example. The coronavirus caused us to be far less visible for each other all of a sudden. We face a big challenge, but it is good to see how soon people find each other online. We are convinced that extra-curricular activities contribute to a safe home feeling for our (international) students. So, we keep investing in activities such as studium generale, symposia as well as social, cultural and sports activities.

We train our students for a career in an international professional field. That asks a lot from our lecturers. The majority of them have an international background or international work experience. What’s more, apart from teaching, many of our lecturers still work in the industry. Our students profit from this because thanks to lecturers’ present-day experience students know very well what is going on in professional practice, and what challenges they face. It also offers opportunities for international work placements and collaborations. We encourage our lecturers to extend this international experience wherever necessary, and actively participate in international networks. For this purpose, we use part of the resources from the Student Loans Act. 

We take it for granted that our lecturers are skilled in their own field of expertise. We encourage lecturers, study coaches and researchers to continue developing their knowledge and skills inside or outside of their expertise all the time. Making crossovers with other disciplines can help students look at a problem definition from various angles. So, we invest in extra training for our staff, and in exchanges. Part of the resources from the Student Loans Act is spent on improving English proficiency of all employees.

Our lecturers and tutors have the right competences to deliver high-quality education. However, apart from quality, sufficient capacity is required for the educational process; sufficient qualified lecturers. From the resources from the Student Loans Act, we want to appoint extra lecturers at an accelerated pace to be able to guarantee continuity and quality of our small-scale education. Having more lecturers available for education offers us more opportunities for more and better coaching of students in the form of personal coaching and training, which contributes to the study success and well-being of our students.

We help students who could use a bit of support by offering what we call BEST training. BEST stands for BEtter STudying. By ‘better’ we do not mean we should raise the bar higher. Not at all, in fact. We would like to contribute to our student’s well-being in an easily accessible way. We do so by offering all sorts of training courses that could help students engage in their studies in a pleasant way, which will contribute to the psychological well-being and eventual study success of our students. We offer training courses in study skills and studying with dyslexia, assertiveness training courses and training courses in which students learn to cope with fear of failure.