Demographic changes, such as the ageing of society and the decline of the birth rate, are gradually leading to the loss of valuable knowledge and experience in the Dutch Labour market. This necessitates an explicit focus on workers' sustainable employment so that they can add value to the organisation throughout their career. This study looks into the way in which the workers' motivation might affect their investments into their own sustainable employment. It was conducted in a major industrial service provider, Sitech Services. The conclusion is that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in both younger and older employees, and that the younger workers undertake more action in order to give physical form to their sustainable employment than their older colleagues.
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Increasing students’ motivation in higher education by designing a specific curriculum has always been a challenging but very complex process. The Department of Business, Finance and Marketing (BFM) of The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) initiated a redesign of the curricula with the major goals of increasing flexibility of learning opportunities and offering students a more motivating, inspiring and richer diversity of learning experiences. In the literature of learning in higher education this has often been labeled as ‘offering extracurricular learning opportunities’. The redesign of the curriculum implies that the new one will result in an enhancement of the flexibility of the curriculum, by offering learning opportunities beyond the borders of specific programs like marketing, finance or entrepreneurship and retail management. The richness and diversity should create flexible platforms, offering students the possibility to enrich their career choices to design their own personalised career path, hopefully maximizing the possibilities for their talent development. However, very little is known about the relationship between the students’ satisfaction with extracurricular learning opportunities, aiming at the personalisation of students’ career choices, and their motivation. In this chapter we describe our research into this relationship between student motivation and learning environments. Designing a network curriculum by increasing the possibility of extracurricular learning opportunities in higher education could have a positive impact on students’ motivation when it is combined with activities to increase goal students’ commitment. This depends on teachers’ qualities to communicate the valence and instrumentality of the learning possibilities offered for the prospective work environment. This is a complex issue however. Teachers from different educational programs, even in the same domain, have a different orientation on existing learning opportunities within one specific program. Excellent coaching skills by tutors are important. These coaching skills are necessary to support students in the process of envisioning extracurricular learning opportunities when important career choices have to be made.
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In the Southern part of Norway, many secondary school pupils drop out due to lack of motivation. Our project aims to enhance pupils’ desire to learn and to complete their education. Here, we investigate possible change in motivation after implementation of an intervention. We specifically focus on pupils’ motivation for their subject, in this study: Norwegian. Meta-cognitive abilities and self-regulated learning have a positive effect on motivation. Therefore, we developed a five-step intervention to strengthen pupils’ self-regulated learning and meta-cognitive abilities. In the intervention, pupils define a) what prevents them from being motivated for learning and b) how they can overcome possible obstacles hindering their learning. Additionally, they discuss this with their peers and formulate their own learning approach to the subject at hand, thus strengthening their sense of autonomy and relatedness. Pupils’ motivation was measured at three time points across the school year (N=101, T1; N=76, T2; N=105, T3). MANOVA revealed that, over the course of the year, pupils became less intrinsically and more extrinsically motivated towards their subject, thus contradicting our expectations and previous findings. Although we aimed to target pupils’ intrinsic motivation, the implementation of our study may also have reduced pupils’ sense of autonomy, thus strengthening their external motivation and moving away from more student-centered learning.
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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.
The transition towards an economy of wellbeing is complex, systemic, dynamic and uncertain. Individuals and organizations struggle to connect with and embrace their changing context. They need to create a mindset for the emergence of a culture of economic well-being. This requires a paradigm shift in the way reality is constructed. This emergence begins with the mindset of each individual, starting bottom-up. A mindset of economic well-being is built using agency, freedom, and responsibility to understand personal values, the multi-identity self, the mental models, and the individual context. A culture is created by waving individual mindsets together and allowing shared values, and new stories for their joint context to emerge. It is from this place of connection with the self and the other, that individuals' intrinsic motivation to act is found to engage in the transitions towards an economy of well-being. This project explores this theoretical framework further. Businesses play a key role in the transition toward an economy of well-being; they are instrumental in generating multiple types of value and redefining growth. They are key in the creation of the resilient world needed to respond to the complex and uncertain of our era. Varta-Valorisatielab, De-Kleine-Aarde, and Het Groene Brein are frontrunner organizations that understand their impact and influence. They are making bold strategic choices to lead their organizations towards an economy of well-being. Unfortunately, they often experience resistance from stakeholders. To address this resistance, the consortium in the proposal seeks to answer the research question: How can individuals who connect with their multi-identity-self, (via personal values, mental models, and personal context) develop a mindset of well-being that enables them to better connect with their stakeholders (the other) and together address the transitional needs of their collective context for the emergence of a culture of the economy of wellbeing?
Due to the existing pressure for a more rational use of the water, many public managers and industries have to re-think/adapt their processes towards a more circular approach. Such pressure is even more critical in the Rio Doce region, Minas Gerais, due to the large environmental accident occurred in 2015. Cenibra (pulp mill) is an example of such industries due to the fact that it is situated in the river basin and that it has a water demanding process. The current proposal is meant as an academic and engineering study to propose possible solutions to decrease the total water consumption of the mill and, thus, decrease the total stress on the Rio Doce basin. The work will be divided in three working packages, namely: (i) evaluation (modelling) of the mill process and water balance (ii) application and operation of a pilot scale wastewater treatment plant (iii) analysis of the impacts caused by the improvement of the process. The second work package will also be conducted (in parallel) with a lab scale setup in The Netherlands to allow fast adjustments and broaden evaluation of the setup/process performance. The actions will focus on reducing the mill total water consumption in 20%.
