AN INTERNATIONAL MODULAR APPROACH ON ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

The Università degli Studi di Milano (UniMi) and Utrecht University (UU), both leading Research universities in Europe, also invest heavily in education. Implementing new ways of teaching and learning in higher education takes time due to the fact that our current teachers are very much copying educational concepts of the past and only a subset of teachers has the design skills, technology knowledge and above all time to remodel their programmes. On the other hand, technological change is going very fast. If we want to keep up with technological change and use new solutions for our education, we need to find ways to change our education (and our teachers) in the same pace!

Utrecht University has a long history of investing in improving Education. In 2002 the Utrecht Educational Model was created. Two (of the four main) principles are Personal and Engaged teaching and Teacher development. In 2014 the university-wide programme Educate-it started with the goal to help teachers innovate their teaching practice by incorporating Blended Learning, conduct evidence based educational research and reach a organizational culture of sustainable innovation. Educate-it offers a wide range of blended and online courses and pedagogical and practical support for their academic staff. Milan has started his ExEL (Experiment of Enhanced Learning) programme in 2016. EXEL aims to foster capacity and community around teaching and to promote an institutional culture that values effective teaching and meaningful learning. Exel collaborates with faculty individuals, academic departments and schools to support and help develop excellent teaching across the university at all stages of a faculty member's career.

Both Milan and Utrecht are members of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) and participate in the E-Learning Thematic Group. The E-Learning Thematic Group has different task groups, of which academic development is one. In this task group the members agreed on sharing training content, tools and and courses, institutional strategies and research on academic development. It was in this thematic E-Learning group that the Milan team heard of the UU course “How to (re)design your Blended Learning course” and Milan and Utrecht decided to work together on offering the course to the teachers in Milan.

This was considered to be a pilot experience towards an international collaboration on Academic Development. Can we easily share our training content or do we need a different, even modular approach on localizing the content depending on institutional strategies or (organizational) culture? In our paper, we would like to share the experience and challenges we met. But above all we want to share the opportunities.