Nivja de Jong, languages professor at Leiden University, warns about the impact of proposed education budget cuts by the new Dutch government.

Education

Alexander van Oudenhoven has been appointed as the new Director of Education of the Governance of Sustainability master's programme. Van Oudenhoven has been appointed for a four-year period, from 1 October 2022 to 1 October 2026. The programme is taught in The Hague.

Laura Doornkamp, PhD candidate at FGGA, is organizing a symposium on the role of gender representation and gender stereotypes in Dutch secondary education. The symposium will take place on 23 November from 19.00 – 21.30 hours at Wijnhaven. Five questions about the symposium.

During the New Year’s Reception on 11 January 2022, the Pieter de la Court Medal was awarded to two students of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences: Orestes Kyrgiakis and Claire van den Helder. They tell us about the causes they fight for and what it means for the University to be better.…

Students presented the prototypes of educational tools they made in the first ten weeks of the new minor Living Education Lab. We asked two students and a teacher about their first experiences in this minor.

The Honours Academy celebrates its tenth anniversary. How did the institute develop over time, and what are aspirations for the future? We speak with the current Dean and a predecessor who was there at the Academy's founding. A conversation about identity, inspiration, and impact ensues. ‘It is about…

From exploring global issues at LUC to shaping young minds in the classroom, LUC alumna Malou den Dekker shares how her academic journey led to a career in education.

The earlier you introduce children to a language, the sooner they can be captivated by it and see that there is more than just Dutch and English. That is the basis for the language lessons for primary education that Alisa van de Haar, university lecturer of French, collaborated on. ‘Deans from different…

Education

From 1 October, two new Directors of Education will start at the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL). Dennis Claessen as the new director for the master's programme of Biology and Marcel Schaaf as director for the Biology bachelor's programme. Claessen and Schaaf have been appointed for a period of four…

The Leiden University College (LUC) education team behind The Learning Mindset (TLM) has received 800,000 euro’s during the Dutch Higher Education Award Ceremony 2022. The LUC team was second behind Universteit Twente. The prize was awarded during the annual Comenius Festival of the Comenius Network.…

Organisation

Leiden University's humanities have one of the top places in the Times Higher Education Rankings. This year, we were placed 26th.

Education, Finance

Over 20,000 students, lecturers, administrators, support staff and many others protested on 25 November against the plans to make billions of cuts to higher education. Students and staff from Leiden University also travelled to The Hague to voice their objections to the disastrous plans.

A project to improve practicals in science courses has been awarded a 175,000 subsidy. Leiden physicist Paul Logman is one of the applicants, together with colleagues from the UvA and Eindhoven University of Technology.

The FGGA starter grants provide researchers with the opportunity to launch innovative projects that contribute to both scientific knowledge and societal impact. In this article, Allard de Graaf and Joy Lee share their experiences and ambitions for their research, made possible by this funding.

Organisation

Nearly a year since the abrupt switchover to mostly online learning, the Digital Education seminar gave teaching staff the opportunity to review their experiences. What can stay in 2021 and what must go? Frequently voiced opinions: yes please to digital tools that make lectures more interactive; yes…

Marco van Eijk is the new Educational Director of the Bachelor's Life Science and Technology (LST). Since 1 September he has been responsible for ensuring the quality of the programme. ‘LST is a unique programme and everyone has to keep working hard for that. That is my main task.’

In academia, the mention of Wikipedia might be met with suspicion. However, for Tsolin Nalbantian, university lecturer Modern Middle Eastern Studies, the encyclopedia is an opportunity to broaden the skills of her students and to increase public knowledge. She received a Teaching Comenius Fellowship…

Evaluations of a most challenging year to both staff and students in terms of teaching and education support have turned out remarkably well. Although we had to switch to online education almost overnight, we pulled it off!

ICT

In the Netherlands, people probably grew up with De Fabeltjeskrant (a children’s show, ed.), but in France an introduction to fables plays a much more important role in a child's upbringing. PhD candidate Céline Zaepffel studied the role of fables in French education and teaching methods. It turns out…

Photographing fluorescent flowers, searching for frogs and shooting tropical cucumbers out of trees: this is only a small part of the course Tropical Biodiversity and Field Methods. For this class, master’s students biology traveled to Malaysian Borneo for two weeks to gain experience in fieldwork.…

After an extensive content analysis of the coalition agreement, a sharp fall can be seen in the focus on education & culture, science & technology and defence. This is the conclusion of university public administration professors Gerard Breeman and Arco Timmermans. They compared the content with all…

Whilst 2020 has been an unusual and taxing year for colleagues at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA), the Institute nevertheless can look back on an impressive range of successful grant applications during the previous year. This impressive result was achieved on top of excellent results…

How can I align science, society and myself to address today’s major challenges? That’s what students of the Honours College track ‘Science, Society and Self’ aim to find out. How do their classes at honours differ from their regular education?

In collaboration with the Honours Academy at Leiden University, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga and Hadassah Drukarch from eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies, coordinated a Pre-University Class on Robot Law.

From 1 October onwards, Dennis Claessen and Marcel Schaaf will be the new directors of education of Biology. They will replace Han de Winde. Schaaf will be responsible for the bachelor, while Claessen will mainly focus on the master tracks of Biology. We gave students and the education office the change…

The results of the National Student Survey (NSE) are now available. In 2024, students from the Faculty of Humanities were satisfied across the board. The expertise of lecturers was rated particularly positively.

The past two years, Laura van der Knaap and Professor Karsten Lambers worked on creating open teaching materials on agent-based modeling, funded by Erasmus+ and in collaboration with Danish, Irish and Dutch partners. Programming is an important skill involved in this, which is often seen as intimidating…

Leiden University was present for the second time at the second Leiden Pride on Saturday.

Three Humanities lecturers received the Senior Teaching Qualification (SKO) this year. Lecturer Hossam Ahmed is one of them. What does he think makes for good education?

The Dutch universities as a whole are lobbying for a 'normal' academic year from the end of August, where on-campus teaching will be possible. It's a view that Leiden University shares. Rector Hester Bijl talks about what teaching will be like then. She also looks back on a year of lockdown.

Conference, Knowledge Café

Festival

Immediately connect with the needs of industry with your master’s degree. The new course Practical Aspects of Quality Management in Pharma and Biotech provides just that. The LACDR and LUMC set up the course together with the Biotech Training Facility, located at the Leiden Bio Science Park. The first…

Making learning material come alive and convey it in the best possible way: that is the aim of education developer Wybrigje de Vries of the Science Teacher Support Desk. Together with university lecturer Edgar Blokhuis, she developed the online module ‘Error Assessment’ for first-year LST bachelor students.…

On Tuesday 6 September, the faculty year 2022-2023 got off to a great start with Leiden Law Op 1, our yearly talkshow live from the Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw. Together with the Faculty Board, academic staff and students, we looked ahead to the upcoming academic year.

A European project should help reinvigorate Latin teaching in secondary schools. 'By focusing on citizenship, we want to show that Latin is relevant to discussions about citizenship and migration.'