€ 7.7 million for better education

Last year, the previous faction of Lijst Calimero offered a process proposal to the board, about the spending of the studievoorschotmiddelen from 2018 onwards. As a reminder: the ‘studievoorschotmiddelen’ are means that became available when the student grants were abolished. Now, they are invested back into education.

2018 is a special transition year, as the studievoorschotten for that year appeared to be higher than initially expected. Not €6.8 million, but €7.7 million euros are given to the UG. Since the sum for the faculties was already decided upon in April, the UG decided to use the extra remaining €2.9 million to invest once in educational innovation. Our proposal from last year was to install a committee that would work out the framework for the usage and accountability of those means.

This happened and after two months of consideration, a proposal for the spending of the studievoorschotten laid before us in the university council meeting last Thursday. We have decided to focus on two major themes. The first one is active learning and interdisciplinary project-based learning. Active learning means no longer conducting a hierarchical method of education, but giving the student a more active role in his or her education. This can be achieved through for instance Perusall, an online tool in which students can comment on the readings for a course. Next to that, the UG wants to set up three interdisciplinary minors that are available for all students. We would like to see that one of these minors will be the minor in rhetorics. You can read our proposal here.

The second theme is personalized learning and personalized feedback. This means the possibility for teachers to give feedback to students online, for example by testing them online halfway through the course, or providing essays with feedback online. The other part of this theme means tracking the performance of students online, so that a study advisor can interfere when this significantly decreases.

The framework for these two theme have been drafted now, and soon to be appointed project groups will get started with this next year. Luckily, we got the affirmation of the board that this framework is flexible, just as the distribution of means over the projects. The project groups can get into dialogue with for instance faculty councils next year, in order to find the best realisation of this approved framework for spending in 2018.