Publicatie naar aanleiding van de internationale Master Class van Stadslab European Urban Design Laboratory. Onderwerp was het ontwikkelen van een regionale ruimtelijke strategie voor deze Poolse universiteitsstad. In de publicatie, naast de resultaten van de Master Class, ook essays van Ruud Vreeman, Ewa Kipta en Didier Rebois.
DOCUMENT
In September 2009 the department of Engineering of Fontys University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands has started a pilot honours program for excellent engineering students called PRogram OUstanding Development (PROUD). Aim of this program is to give those engineering students, who have the ambition, the opportunity to work on extra profession related challenges in their study. By means of this PROUD program Fontys University of Applied Sciences is responding to the wishes of students for extra curricular activities and increasing need from the industry for excellent professionals with an extra level of theoretical knowledge and practical experience. In this paper the courses offered at the Engineering department of the Fontys University of Applied Sciences are discussed. Different study possibilities/routings for students were developed depending on earlier acquainted competences, adaptation abilities to our system (special possibilities for slow starters) and tracking and tracing by intensive study coaching. This resulted in an improvement of the yield of students to 74% of students started in 2008. After working successfully on reducing the drop out rate of our engineering students the department focused on possibilities for excellent students. The department started the PROUD pilot together with engaged engineering students. In 2008 engineering students have carried out a research among their fellow students, lecturers, other institutes [1] and industry. This resulted in a quite different approach of an honours program for the department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. In the PROUD program the student is stimulated to personally shape his educational career and to explicitly work on developing his own competences. The PROUD excellent program starts after the first year and extends to at least 3 semesters in the following years. The student, guided by a supervisor and outside the regular study time, is working on building an excellent portfolio at the university as well as in industry. During this period the PROUD student will work in industry one day a week in average. This is on top of his bachelor educational program. The students will receive an excellent honours certificate together with their bachelor's degree at the end of the study to express their honourable work. Each year about 20 students apply for a place in PROUD but thus far only about 3-4 passed the first interview round. It turns out that student, university and industry are eager to participate in this PROUD program.
DOCUMENT
Energy transition is key to achieving a sustainable future. In this transition, an often neglected pillar is raising awareness and educating youth on the benefits, complexities, and urgency of renewable energy supply and energy efficiency. The Master Energy for Society, and particularly the course “Society in Transition”, aims at providing a first overview on the urgency and complexities of the energy transition. However, educating on the energy transition brings challenges: it is a complex topic to understand for students, especially when they have diverse backgrounds. In the last years we have seen a growing interest in the use of gamification approaches in higher institutions. While most practices have been related to digital gaming approaches, there is a new trend: escape rooms. The intended output and proposed innovation is therefore the development and application of an escape room on energy transition to increase knowledge and raise motivation among our students by addressing both hard and soft skills in an innovative and original way. This project is interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary due to the complexity of the topic; it consists of three different stages, including evaluation, and requires the involvement of students and colleagues from the master program. We are confident that this proposed innovation can lead to an improvement, based on relevant literature and previous experiences in other institutions, and has the potential to be successfully implemented in other higher education institutions in The Netherlands.
Students in Higher Music Education (HME) are not facilitated to develop both their artistic and academic musical competences. Conservatoires (professional education, or ‘HBO’) traditionally foster the development of musical craftsmanship, while university musicology departments (academic education, or ‘WO’) promote broader perspectives on music’s place in society. All the while, music professionals are increasingly required to combine musical and scholarly knowledge. Indeed, musicianship is more than performance, and musicology more than reflection—a robust musical practice requires people who are versed in both domains. It’s time our education mirrors this blended profession. This proposal entails collaborative projects between a conservatory and a university in two cities where musical performance and musicology equally thrive: Amsterdam (Conservatory and University of Amsterdam) and Utrecht (HKU Utrechts Conservatorium and Utrecht University). Each project will pilot a joint program of study, combining existing modules with newly developed ones. The feasibility of joint degrees will be explored: a combined bachelor’s degree in Amsterdam; and a combined master’s degree in Utrecht. The full innovation process will be translated to a transferable infrastructural model. For 125 students it will fuse praxis-based musical knowledge and skills, practice-led research and academic training. Beyond this, the partners will also use the Comenius funds as a springboard for collaboration between the two cities to enrich their respective BA and MA programs. In the end, the programme will diversify the educational possibilities for students of music in the Netherlands, and thereby increase their professional opportunities in today’s job market.
