Interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral cooperation of MBO, HBO and WO education
2015-2016
As educational leader, I played a central role in connecting the regional network of educational teams, and together with business partners guiding and shaping the programme of students. In doing so, I shaped the integral change management process within the educational institutions together with involved students and professionals. The main concerns here included the integration of innovations taking into account existing educational and pedagogical principles and educational logistics.
Students from various educational domains in cross-functional teams from self-direction and self-afficacy to experience the challenges of the Campus Party. The Campus Party provides an international platform for young people to use and discover their talents in the sphere of creativity and innovation.
In addition, the aim was to specifically focus on innovations within education; the EduHackathon. Within the Campus Party, the EduHackaton aims to provide a platform where students, designers, developers, edutech startups, schools and education innovators come together to come up with innovative, technological solutions to today's challenges in education. The larger societal goal of this programme is to turn the problems in the current education system into opportunities through creative and effective educational improvements.
International programme management: Responsible for setting up the co-creative design thinking process, facilitating the teachers in their role of innovation coaches to participate with the student teams in the programme across international borders. This included organising pre-events, coordinating with partners and managing (educational) logistics.
Educational leadership: Implementing innovative teaching strategies and practices, mentoring teachers and students across programme teams, and ensuring the educational quality and linkage of the programme to the qualification requirements of the professional qualification dossiers of the different programmes.
Stakeholder engagement: Actively working with all stakeholders, including educational institutions, students, and industry partners to create a coherent and effective learning environment that is context-rich and meaningful.
The Campus Party and the EduHackaton included work within the themes of lifelong learning based on Self-regulated (not being personalised learning), new technologies/applications, and open source.
Self-regulated, lifelong learning: By empowering students themselves to discover their learning and development and to make choices about those learning contexts they find relevant and linking this to work processes that apply within the demarcation of the profession, we have done justice to finding solutions for self-regulated learning. This linked social issues to students' individual learning and development needs. This approach proved accessible to everyone, regardless of age or background. It strengthened Self-regulated learning and encourages a lifelong, self-directed learning mentality.
New technologies/applications: With a focus on innovation and creativity, it boldly embraced uncertainty within learning by using existing solutions as well as exploring and implementing new technologies.
Open source: Code and solutions were shared publicly and developed into validated prototypes by multidisciplinary student teams after the Campus Party. This led to students feeling even more shared responsibility and loyal to their own, but more importantly each other's learning and development process as a team.
Thus, both technical solutions were designed, and community building was worked on, without explicitly directing this. Mutual respect, continuous growth and innovation ran throughout the collaboration process.
During the 2016 Campus Party in Utrecht, approximately 4,000 students participated in the programme spread across different themes and issues. Because of the great diversity, students had something to choose from and, because of the freedom of choice, they thus worked from their own interests and commitment on the chosen issues, including improving education through technology and innovation.
Self-regulated life-long learning: Several teams developed systems that support self-regulated learning, giving students a more tailored learning experience and teachers a clearer overview of their students' learning. These systems emphasise the flexibility and adaptivity essential for modern education.
New technologies in primary education: An application was developed as the next step in primary education. This application collects and generalises data to enable teachers to see the progress of their students' learning and development, providing a more efficient and effective teaching experience.
SkillHub: An adaptive, crowdsourced learning platform where users can gain skills through interactive assignments. Users track their progress by earning experience points (XP). As users acquire skills, they are rewarded with XP and can earn badges displayed next to their name.
Blossom: A lifelong, community-driven and feedback-driven learning platform. Blossom provides an open learning platform where any student can learn what they want, approaching the world as a playground for personal development.
SOLeSpaces.net: An online platform for Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLeSpaces) worldwide. It provides the infrastructure for these SOLeSpaces by creating an accessible project and course marketplace, with vienna.solespaces.net serving as the first experimental space to experiment a sustainable and scalable model.
Experiences gained by stakeholders around this international and interdisciplinary programme include:
Deploying a hybrid international hackathon: Implementing the methodology of a hybrid international hackathon and challenges on both traditional and already self-regulated student curricula. And understanding which flexible education models work and don't work sufficiently. This in relation to traditional (often linear) curriculum design.
Cross-sector collaboration: The effects of mutual collaboration in cross-sector educational teams, professionals and their students showed the power of diversity and the rich learning experience created when different perspectives and expertise come together.
Integration of learning outcomes: Incorporating student learning outcomes and teacher professionalisation within existing regulations and accountability of learning outcomes. The steps required to achieve developmentally appropriate student portfolios. The construction and accountability of students' examination files also showed the complexity and importance of effective micro-credentials, and 360-degree feedback assessments.
Organisational and legal challenges: Understanding the organisational and legal implications of making education beyond the traditional in institute provided education (IIVO) and professional practice in internship (BPV). And then making proposals for the necessary guidelines and innovations within the teaching institute.
International comparison of support processes: Comparing support processes with other participating countries and process supporters involved in design thinking and agile collaboration brought valuable lessons on international cooperation and efficient working methods. Also when it comes to the effects of cultural diversity in teams.
Societal themes and multidisciplinary teams: Forming teams based on societal themes and degree of complexity of issues. The coaching process of multidisciplinary teams to self-assess which issues are best suited. Researching the right engineering and IT-passionate/related students highlighted the importance of relevant and contextual learning that prepares students for real world problems and solutions.
The learning outcomes were then further implemented within the educational teams and relevant departments, such as legal, rostering, ICT facilities, building, and education policy.
- International programme management
- Educational leadership
- Strategic planning and implementation
- Team leadership and development
- Strategic innovation in education
For more information about the CAMPUS PARTY - EDUHACKATON and our students' achievements, visit the official hackathon page.
For an overview of CAMPUS PARTY events and their impact, visit Campus Party's general website.
For more background information on the history and scope of CAMPUS PARTY, visit its Wikipedia page.
