During the Dutch Design Week (DDW), visitors are challenged to think about big challenges through an interactive game table. The hologram of a student of the future will take care of the introduction. “We want to let people experience what it is like to work together differently. Based on the choices they make together, at the end, the visitors get to see the impact of their action,” said Marcello Sala, project leader ‘the University of the Future’ at TU/e’s innovation Space. The exhibition at the Veemgebouw—one of the design event’s locations—during DDW is part of the University of the Future project.
Start the conversation
The social problems we currently face, such as climate change, are so complex that we need to look beyond the boundaries of disciplines and organizations for solutions. This creates an entirely new system and also changes the role of the university. In addition to knowledge about their chosen field, students increasingly need communication skills or knowledge about leadership. These skills are needed to work in interdisciplinary teams.
Chantal Brans, program manager for educational innovation at TU/e Innovation Space, also outlines the exhibition’s main purpose: to involve people in the development process. “We want to make the university accessible to everyone. An exhibition during DDW is a fun way to do that.”
Detached from existing frameworks
The University of the Future project lasts three years. In 2021, TU/e won the Higher Education Award for its progressive activities within TU/e innovation Space, and the prize money was used to fund this initiative.
The first component, included in the exhibition, focuses on the long term. “The main question is: what will the university look like in 2050? Here, we are looking at the big picture, at the whole system. We are trying to get a picture of the ideal university of the future, independent of existing frameworks in, for example, laws and regulations. We do this together with people within the university, employees, students and researchers, and people from outside the organization, such as the municipality or the business community,” Sala explains.
Learning together
There have now been more than 30 working sessions where the various stakeholders have looked together at the ideal future. “From the first sessions came certain building blocks that we could use again as a starting point for the next sessions,” he says. One of the most important outcomes so far? “In the university of the future, we want a broad learning community. So not only students moving on from, say, secondary school, but also people who already have work experience and want to retrain or upskill. Learning would become a joint activity in which all those involved contribute in their own way.”
Following your own path
In addition to drawing up plans for the university of the future, the project has two other components. The second component looks at collaboration between the university and the ecosystem around it. The final component focuses on learning in student teams. Brans: “For this part of the project, we are mainly looking at how students in the future will be able to shape their learning paths, apart from the existing forms such as lectures and credits. We are also investigating how the university can supervise this process because that also requires the necessary changes regarding flexibility, assessments, and so on.”
For this component, the university conducted practice-oriented research among student teams. “Students generally do not receive credits for participating in a student team. Yet teams have often set up their own system to help members set and achieve learning goals. We can learn a lot from that. The teams were also open to the tools we provided and that is already yielding results,” Brans says.
In practice
The University of the Future will continue until the summer of 2025. Then, the project leaders want to finalize a scenario for the future university. That is anything but easy, Sala observes. “For example, if we want to change the way we assess—separate from credits—that will also have consequences for the financing of the university.” That is a long process and requires regulation changes. “On the other hand, there are parts of the project that we can already test and eventually implement in practice, such as with the student teams. We will definitely work on those.”
Collaboration
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