9 July 2021

Comenius grant

The Comenius programme offers a great opportunity to develop new innovative educational projects that are in line with Leiden’s educational vision (Learning@LeidenUniversity).

In addition to support from the central office when applying, faculty support is also available. The educational advice and quality assurance team is happy to discuss ideas and draft versions with you. Apply for help quickly, because the internal deadline for one A4-sized page on proposed senior and leadership fellowships is 9 August! The letter of intent must be submitted by the beginning of September. 

The Comenius programme

The Comenius programme is a governmental educational innovation programme aimed at innovating and improving education. The programme is divided into three types of grants:

• The Comenius Teaching Fellows (€ 50,000, one-year small-scale project)
• The Comenius Senior Fellows (€ 100,000, two-year faculty project)
• The Comenius Leadership Fellow (€ 250,000, three-year university project).

The themes for the upcoming application round (2022) for the Teaching and Senior Fellow projects are:

• Studying together on the hybrid campus
• Student control in flexible education
• Transdisciplinary cooperation
• Free theme across the full breadth of the Strategic Agenda for Higher Education and Research 'Tenable for the Future'.

Further information about the NRO procedure, the themes and conditions for applying for the Comenius programme can be found on the NRO website. The deadlines for the letters of intent are 14, 7 en 9 September, depending on the programme, so please properly check the information. Please notice: the internal deadline is earlier, namely 9 August 2021!

Internal procedure

Because each faculty can only delegate one candidate for a Senior or Leadership fellowship, we ask interested parties to describe their proposal in one A4-sized page for the faculty selection. To be considered for the selection, the project outline must be submitted before 9 August 2021. Contact Sanne Arens or Annebeth Simonsz before this date to discuss your ideas. You can find the guidelines here (Dutch).

University and faculty support

The university offers support in writing the application (from ICLON and the central department SOZ). For the Comenius Senior Fellow programme, this support will consist of co-writing the proposal and sparring with the lecturer on its content. In addition, support (tips and tricks, looking along with a draft version) is offered for Comenius Teaching Fellow grants. In addition to the support from Central, there is also faculty support available, coordinated by Sanne Arens and Annebeth Simonsz of the educational advice and quality assurance team.

Successful applications 2021

This is the sixth time that calls are issued for the Comenius programme. Leiden University wants to stimulate the number of nominations and further increase the quality of the nominations. Last year, for the Comenius Round 2021, five applications from Leiden University were accepted, including two for the Humanities. Dr. Hossam Ahmed (LIAS) received a Senior Fellowship and Tsolin Nalbantian a Teaching Fellowship. Hopefully, the positive results of the rounds in 2020 and 2021 can be continued and one or more applications can be granted in 2022 as well!

More information

For questions and further information please contact Sanne Arens at s.arens@hum.leidenuniversity.nl or Annebeth Simonsz at a.simonsz@hum.leidenuniv.nl of educational advice and quality assurance.