Innovation is crucial for higher education to ensure high-quality curricula that address the changing needs of students, labor markets, and society as a whole. Substantial amounts of resources and enthusiasm are devoted to innovations, but often they do not yield the desired changes. This may be due to unworkable goals, too much complexity, and a lack of resources to institutionalize the innovation. In many cases, innovations end up being less sustainable than expected or hoped for. In the long term, the disappointing revenues of innovations hamper the ability of higher education to remain future proof. Against the background of this need to increase the success of educational innovations, our colleague Klaartje van Genugten has explored the literature on innovations to reveal mechanisms that contribute to the sustainability of innovations. Her findings are synthesized in this report. They are particularly meaningful for directors of education programs, curriculum committees, educational consultants, and policy makers, who are generally in charge of defining the scope and set up of innovations. Her report offers a comprehensive view and provides food for thought on how we can strive for future-proof and sustainable innovations. I therefore recommend reading this report.
Blended learning, a teaching format in which face-to-face and online learning is integrated, nowadays is an important development in education. Little is known, however, about its affordances for teacher education, and for domain specific didactical courses in particular. To investigate this topic, we carried out a design research project in which teacher educators engaged in a co-design process of developing and field-testing open online learning units for mathematics and science didactics. The preliminary results concern descriptions of the work processes by the design teams, of design heuristics, and of typical ways of collaborating. These findings are illustrated for the case of two of the designed online units on statistics didactics and mathematical thinking, respectively.
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Workshop summaryIn this workshop we work together with the participants towards concrete steps that educators could take to promote inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems. Nowadays, entrepreneurial ecosystems do not provide all entrepreneurs equal access to opportunities, resources, and support. Specifically, entrepreneurial ecosystems remain heavily male-dominated with women and other underrepresented groups facing challenges to access resources and grow their ventures due to a range of (institutional) barriers. This lack of inclusivity is problematic as it limits the release of untapped entrepreneurial potential necessary to maximize the societal and economic benefits of entrepreneurship. During this workshop we want to engage in discussions and propose actions to be undertaken by educators and HEI’s to foster the inclusivity of their institutional and regional entrepreneurial ecosystem in which they are embedded. By using the ‘inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem framework’, we want to raise awareness of this topic and share actionable ideas that participants can implement in their daily practices.
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