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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Poster presented at EFYE 2018. Strengthening the wellbeing of students is an increasingly important approach of the development of students’ social, emotional and academic skills. Personal wellbeing motivates, among other things, students to learn and increases academic involvement and performance accordingly (Noble et al., 2008). According to the Centre for Education of Statistics and Evaluation (CESE, 2015) the educational welfare of students is also important for another reason; the recognition that teaching is not just about achieving academic performance, but also about the welfare of the student as a whole (intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral and spiritual). Recent studies indicate that more and more students suffer from (mental) health problems (LSvB 2013, 2017; Schaufeli et al., 2002). The aim of the Student Wellbeing Project at Inholland University of Applied Sciences is to 1) investigate the state of student wellbeing in Dutch higher education and investigate the factors that influence wellbeing, 2) explore and offer best practices to improve student wellbeing (curative and preventive) 3) establish a strong (international) partnership and collaborate to improve student wellbeing.
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In redesigning its curriculum and learning environment, the HU Business School focuses on improving student engagement. In its turn, this should improve the academic success rates. Moreover, challenging honours students in regular courses is also an aim of the redesign. With this in mind, we developed a pilot course in which students are offered five different options of coaching and tuition from the lecturer. This approach was called “The tuition Pentagon”. The five options are designed to match different levels of motivation, competence and ambition. Students reflect on their motivation, competence and ambition and choose their preferred option. An option with extra assignments offers a challenge for honours students.
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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.
Physical rehabilitation programs revolve around the repetitive execution of exercises since it has been proven to lead to better rehabilitation results. Although beginning the motor (re)learning process early is paramount to obtain good recovery outcomes, patients do not normally see/experience any short-term improvement, which has a toll on their motivation. Therefore, patients find it difficult to stay engaged in seemingly mundane exercises, not only in terms of adhering to the rehabilitation program, but also in terms of proper execution of the movements. One way in which this motivation problem has been tackled is to employ games in the rehabilitation process. These games are designed to reward patients for performing the exercises correctly or regularly. The rewards can take many forms, for instance providing an experience that is engaging (fun), one that is aesthetically pleasing (appealing visual and aural feedback), or one that employs gamification elements such as points, badges, or achievements. However, even though some of these serious game systems are designed together with physiotherapists and with the patients’ needs in mind, many of them end up not being used consistently during physical rehabilitation past the first few sessions (i.e. novelty effect). Thus, in this project, we aim to 1) Identify, by means of literature reviews, focus groups, and interviews with the involved stakeholders, why this is happening, 2) Develop a set of guidelines for the successful deployment of serious games for rehabilitation, and 3) Develop an initial implementation process and ideas for potential serious games. In a follow-up application, we intend to build on this knowledge and apply it in the design of a (set of) serious game for rehabilitation to be deployed at one of the partners centers and conduct a longitudinal evaluation to measure the success of the application of the deployment guidelines.
Het DIEET project onderzocht hoe de eerstelijns diëtetiek effectief en toekomstbestendig zou kunnen zijn: meetbaar en stuurbaar. In het project is onderzocht wat de succes- en faalfactoren zijn in het handelen van de diëtist tijdens het eerste consult met een patiënt. Door observaties van 605 consulten bij 237 diëtistenpraktijken in heel Nederland zijn potentiele predictoren in kaart gebracht. Op basis van deze predictoren (zoals bijv. een directieve houding van de dietist tijdens het consult) en het vaststellen van een effectieve behandeling na 9 maanden is een model ontwikkeld. Het model bleek echter minder eenvoudig dan gedacht, en de verklaring daarvoor is eigenlijk wel eenvoudig: diëtetiek is MAATWERK. Zo bleek bijvoorbeeld dat bij oudere mannen de directieve houding van de diëtist wel samen gaat met een effectieve behandeling, bij jonge vrouwen werkt motivational interviewing beter. Dit is voor de diëtetiek (en volgens onze voorzichtige inschatting ook andere beroepsgroepen) volstrekt unieke informatie. Deze resultaten hebben we nog een keer kwalitatief met de Stuurgroep van het RAAK-MKB project DIEET besproken en unaniem besloten dat de impact van dit product (model) voor de praktijk heel groot is. Deze nieuwe inzichten zullen ook verwerkt worden in de nieuwe druk van het boek (landelijk lesmateriaal diëtetiek opleidingen) dat is ontwikkeld (Neelemaat F, Ozturk H, Weijs P. Kritisch Redeneren in de Diëtetiek; bol.com). Het ontwikkelde model bleek door het maatwerk fors ingewikkelder dan vooraf ingeschat. Dit model kan echter in een web-based applicatie worden ingebouwd en de predictoren kunnen worden ingevoerd. Met deze applicatie kan bij elke diëtetiek (paramedische) stage en bij elke diëtist professional een scan worden gedaan op effectief handelen. Bij de studenten zal een relatie worden gelegd met het stagecijfer en bij de professionals met de effectieve behandeling na 9 maanden. Implementatie van de webbased applicatie in de eerstelijns diëtetiek praktijk zal meteen breed worden ingezet. Echter onderdeel van deze aanvraag is een interventie en controle groep, waarbij de interventie groep wel feedback krijgt op basis van de score en de controle groep niet. De snelle feedback (na het consult en niet pas na 9 maanden) is namelijk de sleutel tot succes. Top-up subsidie is nodig om voor het bestaande model een web-based tool te ontwikkelen en ontsluiting naar onderwijs en beroepspraktijk te bevorderen. Om in de toekomst goed gebruik van de tool door professionals, onderzoekers, studenten en docenten mogelijk te maken, is een geïntegreerde web-versie van de tool wenselijk waarin nieuwe updates eenvoudig kunnen worden doorgevoerd. Tot slot kan met Top-up de tool beter ontsloten worden voor de praktijk en voor inzet in het onderwijs door het maken van enkele goede casus beschrijvingen en het presenteren van de tool door middel van bijvoorbeeld workshops. Door Top-Up op deze manier in te zetten krijgt de doorwerking van de resultaten van het RAAK-project een flinke extra impuls.
