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Leiden teachers share experiences on new blog

On the brand-new Leiden Teachers Blog, Leiden teachers share their experiences with educational innovation. They show colleagues, students, and everyone else who is interested the different facets of creating university education.

The Leiden Teachers Academy was founded in 2014 to stimulate innovation in education and reward excellent teachers. The Teachers Academy consists of 24 Teaching Fellows, lecturers who have been chosen for their remarkable expertise, their drive to innovate, and their openness towards multidisciplinary collaboration. Teaching Fellows all receive a grant for projects in substantive and didactic innovations in education, which they carry out over the course of their 5-year Fellowship.

Stimulating the exchange of insights into educational innovation is also one of the Fellows’ tasks. They do this with lunch-lectures and an annual university-wide symposium, and the Leiden Teachers Blog will be a new addition to the list. On this platform, the Fellows will publish a bi-weekly blogpost in which they introduce their projects, share experiences and ‘best practices’, and reflect on the need for educational innovation in an accessible way.

Kick-off by the chairs

The Leiden Teachers Blog is an initiative by the two chairs of the Leiden Teachers Academy, Arianna Pranger and Thijs Porck. Setting things up for success, the first two blog posts will be written by them. Pranger, winner of the LUS Teaching Prize in 2020, will take the reader on her creative journey. How do you ensure that university education is in line with the current events and with students’ perceptions? Where do you get inspiration from? She will use the creative process of the “COVID-19 podcasts for non-experts, by students”- assignment and of the “Toxicology Education Day” as an example in her blog. Porck, who won the LUS Teaching Prize in 2019, will use his blog to reflect on his knowledge clips on Old English that have gathered over 180.000 views on YouTube. How does one make effective knowledge clips, and what are the merits of sharing these on a global platform?

Recognition for teaching in academia

The Leiden Teachers Blog is one of the many weblogs of Leiden University, but it is unique for its specific focus on academic teaching. This makes the blog not only a great platform to share experiences and insights into academic teaching, but an important signal that Leiden University is more than just a research institute as well. In this light, the blog fits in well with the university-wide developments to create more recognition for teaching in academia. After all, there is no such thing as bringing too much awareness to the significance of educational innovation and the need for creating the right circumstances for this to be implemented and shared.

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