New members of Leiden Teachers’ Academy dedicated to educational innovation
Five new Teaching Fellows have joined the Leiden Teachers’ Academy. Their educational innovation projects will introduce students and teaching staff to new forms of teaching, innovative uses of AI and closer collaboration between the university and professional practice in the years ahead.
The Leiden Teachers’ Academy (LTA) currently has 27 Teaching Fellows. Each year, new fellows are selected from nominees put forward by the faculties. Fellows are committed to educational innovation, share their experiences and seek closer collaboration with teaching staff both within and beyond their own discipline. The winner of the LUS Teaching Prize, this year archaeologist Rachel Schats, automatically becomes a Teaching Fellow. Schats was already a member of the LTA and had been working on a project. She will now continue that work.
The Teaching Fellows receive a € 25,000 fellowship from the university for one or more educational innovation projects. The new members have already submitted the projects they plan to work on.
Marije Schneider, Leiden Law School
The Change Laboratory project builds on an educational innovation method developed by and for teaching staff. This approach will be further refined through a modular toolkit containing teaching methods, design tools, literature and knowledge clips.
In annual Change Labs, teaching staff, students and educational experts work together to redesign courses. Two challenges are central to this work. The first is the use of AI in teaching and assessment. The second is the continued development of transferable skills (such as public speaking) in law programmes.
For students, this leads to a more active and challenging learning experience. It also creates greater coherence and clarity within the curriculum through better alignment between courses and between the bachelor’s and master’s programmes. Thanks to the cyclical process of development, implementation, evaluation and further refinement, improvements are embedded sustainably. Collaboration with ICLON, LLInC and other faculties also makes it possible to apply and scale up successful innovations more broadly.
Bernard Bernards, FGGA, Public Administration
Bernards aims to structurally integrate traditional university programmes with programmes for working professionals. This responds to the growing demand for lifelong learning and for accessible, academic programmes that allow professionals to update their knowledge in a targeted way.
Central to this is the mixed classroom where students and professionals learn together. Professionals bring practical experience, while students contribute theoretical and academic perspectives. Professionals can participate in existing courses and receive a university certificate upon completion.
The approach will be developed, tested and implemented over the coming years within the Master’s programme in Public Sector Management before being expanded to other courses in the Public Administration programme. The project is intended to result in a toolkit for mixed classrooms, support for seminar instructors through mini-grants and knowledge sharing within FGGA and Leiden University, enabling this form of teaching to be implemented more widely.
Ingrid Samset, FGGA, Leiden University College
Samset plans to explore how specially developed Pedagogical AI Assistants (PAIA) can help students learn more effectively as an alternative to general-purpose generative AI tools. The project is based on Self-Determination Theory, which holds that effective learning is supported by autonomy (ownership and control over the learning process), competence (the development of knowledge and skills) and relatedness (meaningful relationships with others).
The project builds on pilot studies in three Leiden University College courses in which various AI assistants were used. Over the next five years, Samset will further develop and investigate their use. The project should result in a general learning pathway on learning with AI, with evidence-based principles for the use of AI assistants in education and assessment. It will also address human-AI collaboration, critical reflection and the well-being of both students and teaching staff.
Susana Valdez, Faculty of Humanities, Linguistics
Civic AI is an educational innovation project in the humanities that helps students develop skills in multilingual communication, digital literacy and AI literacy. The project focuses on the critical, ethical and sustainable use of technology. Valdez also aims to develop multilingual tools for municipal and civil society partners working with migrant and multilingual communities.
As part of the project, students use AI to redesign materials provided by partner organisations. Together with civil society organisations, they collect multilingual stories using AI-assisted transcriptions and translations, which they will critically review and edit.
In this way, students gain practical experience, build a portfolio and contribute to improving communication with a range of target groups. The teaching materials developed will also be made available to other degree programmes.