The Community for Learning & Innovation (CLI) gives lecturers from Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) the opportunity to apply for a fellowship. With this fellowship, they research educational innovation, or carry out an educational project.
On this page you can read more about Gera Noordzij's (EUC) CLI Fellowship about advancing a horizontal learning into the skills curriculum at EUC.
Rapidly changing societies & labour-market demands require transferrable, soft skills of students (i.e., 21st-century skills). Education plays a vital role in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that enable students to contribute to an inclusive and sustainable future. In response to these demands and the observed challenges our students at Erasmus University College encounter in applying the skills learned during the first-year curriculum to subsequent courses and projects, we propose a rethink of the skills curriculum. This rethink focuses on developing a horizontal learning pathway in the curriculum, in which the learning objectives for the skills curriculum are specified at the macro-, meso- and micro-level. By step-wise interlinking the skills courses, among themselves and to the programme’s Intended Learning Outcomes, and simultaneously integrating them to a collaborative basestone project, we aim to teach our students necessary 21st-century or soft skills for a longer-term retention to foster professional development.
Presentation during Fellows Connect
On September 21, 2022, Gera presented EUC's horizontal, skills line for first year students. The skills line offers an interdisciplinary, integrative, relevant, and coherent set of tools that can be applied directly in parallel and subsequent courses and the capstone (bachelor thesis) and which are valuable throughout a lifetime.
During the presentation, Gera shared her experiences with colleagues across EUR who are interested in, or already work on implementing skills trajectories in their programs. She focused on the lessons learned – not only what went well, but also the important pitfalls and setbacks EUC has faced during the implementation of the skills line. She focused on what could have been done to prevent such setbacks in other programs, and explained how the EUC works to further improve their implementation.
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- More CLI Fellowship projects