In 2014, Leiden University launched the Teachers’ Academy to reward top talents in education and stimulate educational innovation. Lecturers who are selected as Teaching Fellows join the Teachers' Academy and are awarded a grant for educational innovation projects. The Teachers’ Academy also organises an annual symposium on innovation in education. A strong incentive for a university-wide qualitative improvement of education.

Read more about the LTA.

Grassfields provides funding for recently completed and ongoing educational projects that present a clear case for broader application within the university. This fund will scale up educational innovations with a cross‑faculty character and exists to ensure that innovation projects do not fail after a successful pilot phase, provided that the only barrier to scaling up is the lack of other (external) funding.

Read more about Grassfields.

Through Kiem, Leiden University will provide 25 annual seed grants between 2024 and 2026 to develop new interdisciplinary (interfaculty) teaching/research collaborations and encounters. Kiem applications (€10,000 per project) should involve staff from at least two faculties at Leiden University.

Proposals could focus on network building, organising seminars and workshops, conducting a pilot study, revision of an education programme, preparing research proposals, etc.

Read more about Kiem.

Each year, the Leiden University Student Platform (LUS) presents the Leiden Education Prize.

The prize is awarded to the lecturer who has taught in the most creative and inspiring way in the past academic year. Students can nominate their lecturer if they feel they are eligible for the award, after which the LUS will compile a shortlist of three finalists after college visits. During the opening of the academic year, the LUS chairperson will announce which of them is the winner.

Read more about previous winners of the Leiden Education Prize.

The Leiden University Fund (LUF) offers several grant rounds that support education and research at Leiden University, for example to stimulate interfaculty collaboration.

Read more about current calls. 

The Comenius Innovation Programme for higher education and universities of applied science provides lecturers with the resources to implement their vision on education. Every year, the programme provides a variety of grants to promote a wide range of teaching innovations. The government’s aim with this programme is to clearly demonstrate its appreciation for excellence and enthusiasm in teaching.

Each grant sets different requirement. Read about it here.

The Dutch Higher Education Award was introduced by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science in 2021 to recognise and reward educational teams from research universities, universities of applied sciences and vocational institutions that have developed an exceptional initiative innovating and improving higher education over the last four years. Every institution may nominate one team. The rector makes this selection after a consideration of qualifying initiatives with the vice-deans. In each sector (mbo, hbo and universities) three prizes are awarded of €1.2 million, €800,000, and €500,000 respectively. The prizes are meant to further stimulate projects that innovate and improve higher education, to be determined jointly by the winning team with the faculty/faculties involved and the rector. 

SoTL stands for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and is an approach to inquiry in education that sits at the intersection of teaching and research. Applicants are given the opportunity to use scholarly literature to critically reflect on their own teaching and to explore possible improvements.

This grant round funds small projects with a short duration of one to two years, in which lecturers investigate their own teaching practice in an evidence‑informed manner.

Read more on the NKO website.  

The aim of this grant is to give lecturers the opportunity to implement previously completed innovation projects and disseminate them to other programmes or institutions. Innovations whose approach appears to be effective based on evaluations, research, or practical experience are scaled up through this grant round and reach a wider audience.

Read more on the NKO website.