Conference programme

On November 10, 2021, the Taskforce Learning & Innovation will organise their annual conference in Maastricht. The conference is free of charge for everyone interested in our conference, be it an (educational) scientist, a teacher, or a student, from within or outside Maastricht University. There is no need to submit an abstract to attend the conference, but because of Covid-19 rules, registration is mandatory. We will start with coffee at 9.30 and end with drinks at around 15.30 hours.

The taskforce is very pleased to have prof. dr. Bart Rienties as keynote speaker for the conference. Prof. Rienties is a professor of Learning Analytics at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University UK.

During the conference, PhD-students and postdocs will have the opportunity to present their research in the field of Learning and Innovation with a short pitch and a poster. In addition, there will be four (parallel) workshops related to the main Learning & Innovation research themes of Maastricht University.

The conference will most likely have a hybrid form. The sessions can be attended live, but we will also arrange opportunities to join the sessions online. More information about this will follow.

Please have a look at the full programme (time is Central European Time):

9.30 – 10.00 Coffee

10.00 – 11.00 Opening by prof. dr. Peter Møllgaard

Keynote by prof. dr. Bart Rienties, titled "What we have learned from big and small data studies at the Open University UK: doing learning analytics at scale"

11.00 – 12.00 Pitches by PhD students and postdocs

12.00 – 12.45 Lunch, including posters by PhD students and postdocs

12.45 – 13.45 Workshop round (see below for workshop descriptions)

Choose between:

- Problem Based Learning (PBL) now and in the future

- Lifelong Development

13.45 – 14.00 Short break

14.00 – 15.00 Workshop round (see below for workshop descriptions)

Choose between:

- Internationalization

- Human cognition, learning, and education

15.00 – 15.30 Reflection and closing remarks by the Taskforce Learning & Innovation

15.30 – … Drinks

We will then in due time provide you with more information on the conference.

Workshop descriptions

Workshop 1: PBL Now and in the Future - Round 1

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of various educational delivery approaches, such as online, hybrid, and blended learning. These approaches introduce important elements that are crucial to consider in order to optimize the design, delivery, and assessment of student’s learning. In this workshop, by means of a world cafe, we want to host a dialogue on the impact of research findings on blended, online and hybrid learning (in the Problem Based Learning model and beyond) and future research needs in this area.

Workshop 2: Lifelong development - Round 1

Due to technological innovations, robots have become equipped to take up our routine tasks. While this is generally perceived as negative for those working on routine tasks, it has not led to replacement of human jobs. However, research has shown that it influences the task – and hence skills - demands of workers. To keep up with the speed of innovation, we need a culture of lifelong learning, covering the whole range of formal, informal, and non-formal learning. By means of a gallery walk, participants are introduced to a number of relevant questions in this field and will jointly try to answer how we could research these questions.

Workshop 3: Internationalization - Round 2

After the Bologna Declaration was signed in 1999, European higher education became more attractive to foreign students. This led to increased internationalization at many universities in- and outside of the Netherlands. Research suggests that this development may benefit students’ learning, but it can also have adverse consequences. This workshop revolves around a debate that focuses on identifying the prose and cons of internationalization of higher education and, subsequently, on how can approach the cons to the advantage of students and staff at our universities.

Workshop 4: Human cognition, learning, and education - Round 2

Within Maastricht University and other institutes, researchers are engaged in scientific studies trying to understand human cognition, and specifically how learning works, and how these insights can be translated to effective education. This workshop is an open invitation to those researchers and those who aren’t doing research but are interested in these topics to join, get to know each other, share and create. In a speed dating format, you are challenged to come up with a joint research idea connected to human cognition, learning and education. Attendees vote for the best idea, which will be awarded with a (limited) financial compensation to kickstart the execution of the idea.

Rianne Letschert (rector magnificus at UM) explained the importance of Learning & Innovation (L&I) research and the importance of getting together with researchers, teachers, policy makers and other kinds of experts, to pick each others brains. To learn what societal challenges could be tackled by research in the field of learning and innovation. And to learn what cross overs UM researchers could establish, with colleagues within and outside the university. What is our common ground? In which fields can we stand out and really add value to reality? The conference was set-up to think in terms of possibilities and opportunities. To bring back the spirit of the old days, when this university started and nothing was set in stone.

In order to get more insight into the focus of L&I research at UM, the audience was asked what, according to them, UM’s strengths are when it comes to research on L&I. The most frequent answers were, not surprisingly, Problem-Based Learning (PBL), interdisciplinary, active learning and international. Additionally, the audience was asked to name a niche within the field of L&I at UM that should receive more attention. It became clear that the majority of the answers was related to cognitive science, technology and students.

Workshops

Trends and developments in education and learning​

During the ‘Trends and development in education and learning’ workshop, organised by Dr. Roy Erkens (teacher plant evolutionary biology at the Maastricht Science Programme, course/skills coordinator and chair of the Educational Programme Committee of the Maastricht Science Programme), participants were invited to think about opportunities and possibilities to innovate education.

To do this, participants read case-descriptions, and were asked to come up with innovative ideas that could be applied to the case. Subsequently, participants were asked to cluster these ideas in a matrix, with the elements ‘difficult – easy’ and ‘standard – novel’’.

It proved to be difficult to think outside the box and come up with radical innovations that would change the system. A first tentative conclusion is that challenges in the field of innovation lie more at the level of the teacher than at the level of the students.

Infinite learning and competence development

This workshop was organised by Dr. Johan Adriaensen (Assistant Professor at FASoS at Maastricht University, and Research Coordinator CERiM). Three topics were discussed:

• Identify relevant skills and competences - What skills are important? What do we want to learn?

• Design curricula to facilitate their training - How can we learn those skills? Which shape would this take?

• Improve our teaching practices.

In this workshop many fundamental and practical questions were raised? Should university teaching focus on skills development? Who gets to determine the skills to be learned (academia, the students or the future employees? Is PBL the optimal didactic to learn skills. Another theme that was discussed was the role of exams, and knowledge acquisition in relation to the developments of AI. This provides a lot of food for thought and inspiration for many new research projects.

Wrap-up

The main conclusions of the conference: There is much enthusiasm and willingness to collaborate in research on learning & innovation. Many new, and not so new, ideas were brought up, opportunities were signalled and new energy was created.

Photos: Philip Driessen