As the ideas and plans regarding an Innovation Lab become increasingly clear, it also made aware that in parallel a new initiative is gathering speed: a Teaching Academy.
This initiative, led by driven educators and supported by Academic Affairs, aims to empower the educators of Erasmus University by offering a community for sharing knowledge, discussing and trying out new ideas and to further increased appreciation for the craft of teaching.
In the last couple of months, backers of both initiatives met together and joined each other’s events and soon noticed not only the many overlaps, but especially the great potential of a combined approach. The conclusion is therefore to join hands and work towards a common goal, or in shorthand:
Innovation Lab + Teaching Academy = The Educators' Hub.
The goal of The Educators' Hub is a reinvigorated appreciation of one of the core values of our university: high quality teaching. Although proper appreciation of high quality teaching as a worthy goal may already appear self-explanatory, it may be added that this goal will not only directly benefits two major stakeholders at EUR (the students and the educators), but also the institution as a whole, as the quality of teaching gets an ever increasing and well-deserved weight in the international rankings of higher education.
During the Summer a joint proposal will be worked out by Farshida Zafar, Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens and Job van Maurik, in consultation with many involved parties within Erasmus University, that aims to position The Educators' Hub as a conduit through which the swift evaluation of innovative changes to the ways we teach, the overall appreciation of good teaching and the empowerment of the educators on campus may come together. At its heart, or even more apt in its DNA, The Educators' Hub will offer a forum (the Teaching Academy, or TA) and a laboratory (the Innovation Lab, or iLab), which will be used as means for the educators of Erasmus University to congregate, to discuss, to experiment, to identify, to learn, to grow and to move forward.
The Educators' Hub will not act in a vacuum, nor will it attempt to replicate good efforts already taken on within our university. The Educators' Hub aims to achieve its goals by not only getting the educators, but also policy makers and services of the EUR for which high quality teaching is a shared and aspired goal, to work together. And let’s not forget the students, who will not be considered as just passive recipients, but who will be invited to actively join both the forum and the laboratory.