More than 260 visitors from home and abroad will gather in the Auditorium next Thursday for the first National Challenge-Based Learning Conference. Besides TU/e researchers, specialists from other Dutch institutions will also present their findings there. TU/e Innovation Space director Isabelle Reymen, who together with ESoE's Jan Vermunt is carrying a major research project on Challenge-Based Learning, is delighted with the high interest and "with the opportunities for knowledge exchange and collaboration that the conference creates."

Globally, Monterrey in Mexico is the knowledge centre on Challenge-Based Learning (CBL), an Italian study recently showed. But Eindhoven is not far below that, Isabelle Reymen knows. "In the Innovation Space, we bring four thousand students into contact with CBL every year via electives, among other things, and we can add to that the seven hundred members of the student teams - because that too is CBL. And from September, when the new Bachelor College starts, CBL will be a structural part of the undergraduate curriculum."

The TU/e was quick to catch on and has already implemented CBL on a large scale, Reymen wants to say. Moreover, three years ago, the scientific director of innoSpace was appointed a Comenius Leadership Fellow, a title that comes with half a million euros in budget for CBL research - money that has been invested in two postdocs, for example. This was followed less than a year later by the first National Higher Education Premium for the innoSpace teaching team, of 1.2 million euros


Isabelle Reymen. Photo | Rob Stork

All this makes Eindhoven the location of choice for the first national conference on Challenge-Based learning, on Thursday 15 June. The programme, consisting of presentations, workshops, poster rounds and roundtable sessions, is divided into three themes: Course & Curriculum design, Student learning and Teaching & Teacher learning. Besides TU/e researchers, speakers from Delft, Enschede, Wageningen, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Groningen will also take the floor.

Argentina

With over 260 participants - registration has now closed - all sessions in the Auditorium will be well-filled. All Dutch universities and universities of applied sciences are represented, and Reymen is also pleased with the great international interest: "There will be visitors from Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Italy, Luxembourg, Lithuania and Norway, many of whom heard about the conference through their network and got in touch: can we come too?"

The organisation of the conference is in the shared hands of TU/e innovation Space and the Eindhoven School of Education(ESoE), together with TU/e and 4TU.CEE. InnoSpace and ESoE mostly pull together in the research on CBL. Reymen: "ESoE professor Jan Vermunt and I jointly submitted the application to the Comenius programme in 2020 - I couldn't have done it without him and he couldn't have done it without me. We also supervise both postdocs together." Those postdocs, Kerstin Helker and Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway, will present their interim results in several sessions on Thursday.

Reymen is looking forward to the knowledge exchange during the conference and to the collaboration that may ensue, in order to advance CBL in higher education. This knowledge exchange also plays an important role within TU/e, she says: "The university has a large CBL research community that meets regularly - a unique situation." Apart from innoSpacers and ESoE researchers, this community also includes lecturers who develop CBL education in their own faculty, for example within the USE curricula, and publish about it.

World

In the back of their minds, Reymen and co-researchers always keep the higher goal of their work in mind: "We want to change education because the world is changing. By presenting students with big, open-ended challenges, we teach them skills that are indispensable for the future: thinking at a systems level, collaborating, taking the lead in your own learning, and dealing with uncertainty - the need for which we all experienced in corona time."

CBL has also brought the outside world into education, says Reymen: "In the field of research, TU/e has always worked extensively with other parties, but now students can already get to know industry, government - and even artists- in their studies."

What Reymen always notices is that today's students are very eager to contribute to a better world. "If, in doing so, they can then choose a topic where their passion lies - whether it is sustainable energy or smart mobility - they are extra motivated to go that extra mile." How to optimally stimulate and facilitate students in doing so is the question that will be the focus of the conference this Thursday.

Over the top image: This photo was taken last year during an innoXchange research session on CBL (photo: Bart van Overbeeke)

author: Lydia van Aert
photo: Bart van Overbeeke
source: TU/e Cursor news