Sara de Wit
Assistant professor - FGW

In short

The Leiden University Africa Latin America Beats podcast is a cooperation between the two Area Studies sections of Leiden University’s Institute for History.

The podcast is intended as a platform for critical discussions amongst practitioners, scholars and students on issues typical of Area Studies’ epistemologies: diversity, inequality, power and cultural interactions.

Discussions take place with guests from within and outside Leiden University on issues pertaining to Africa and Latin American history, language, culture and politics

I raise the idea in class, and also include creating smaller podcast as part of assignments, hence inspiring students to expend their ideas more in detail.

Results

• Engagement between students and professors have become more frequent;
• Students are more involved in projects regarding the study;
• Students are more motivated to participate in the formation of the future of the study.

See the poster (PDF)

María Pérez Rodríguez (+ team) & Jiske Angenent
Coordinator/lecturer - LUCL & Digital Assessment Coordinator - IFZ

Summary

The migration from Remindo to Ans gave us the opportunity to redesign and expand the question banks, which we had built up over the years, in line with the Constructive alignment of the course.

With the new exams in Ans we want to use assessment methods that represent the learning objectives and are related to the teaching & learning activities: you analyse the performance of your students based on the learning objectives of your course.

For all language skills courses that are part of BAIS, multiple question banks have been created, each with exercises clearly linked to a specific learning objective. Because of this, teachers can automatically generate unique exams each year with one click using a learning objective matrix.

Results

With the enhancement of the question bank and Ans' new Blueprint functionality, it is now easy for teachers to set up their own exam. This significantly alleviates the workload for teachers and support.

In addition, you guarantee that your exam meets the learning objectives you have set for your course. This ensures better assessment of the discussed material.

After the exam, teachers get insight into analytical values per learning objective and are able to monitor the degree of acquired knowledge within a learning objective across the student group. During a review moment, students can also see their score per learning objective.

By enriching question banks with learning objectives, exams can be automatically generated each year based on learning objectives. This improves exam quality and lowers teacher and support workload.

See the poster (PDF)

Eline Sikkema & Rik Sander
Lecturer Japanese Studies & student assistant – LIAS

In short

Authentic materials, such as news articles and videos, are integrated into the course materials for the first-year reading courses in Japanese Studies. The Articulate Rise module is not limited to Japanese Studies and includes, among other things, practical guidelines and real-life examples.

Objectives

Increase the diversity of course materials and contextualise students’ vocabulary and grammar knowledge.

Context

Finding clear approaches is often challenging when you want to use authentic materials.

Results

• Greater diversity and depth in the course materials. Because authentic materials contain language expressions that are not typically found in textbooks, they offer lecturers opportunities to enhance students’ reading motivation and language awareness.

• Authentic materials challenge students and teach them to engage with language as it is used in real-life contexts.

The experiences gained from the first-year reading courses also contribute to the development of the Articulate Rise module.

See the poster (PDF)

Minke Jonk-Thuong
ICT and Education Coordinator - IFZ

Grading essays takes a considerable amount of time, especially when much of that time is spent checking non-content-related aspects such as grammar and punctuation. It’s helpful when this can be delegated to AI. At the same time, students are encouraged to revise and critically assess their own work before submitting it.

The innovation

Automated Feedback can review a first draft of student essays for elements such as correct grammar, punctuation, and referencing style. Students can use the formative feedback to revise their work before submitting a final version of their essay.

• Engages students
• Reduces workload for lectuers

See the poster (PDF)

Julian van der Kraats
Inititor AI – ISSC

In short

LUCA, the Leiden University Cognitive Agent, is a platform designed for both lecturers and students. Lecturers can use AI to create their own bots, based on didactically proven templates. Examples include a Socratic-style tutoring bot or a bot that generates practice questions tailored to their course material. LUCA also offers anonymised insights into how the bot is being used, providing a clearer view of where students may need additional support.

We are currently running pilot projects with lecturers who are interested in experimenting with the platform. However, we are requesting a one-time budget allocation, as we do not yet have the internal capacity to manage the platform structurally.

• More support for students
• Less workload for lecturers

See the poster (PDF)

Feel connected! Dialogue in education for better student-wellbeing

Karin Nijenhuiz
Lecturer - African Studies Centre Leiden

The dialogue

The dialogue, based on David Bohm’s philosophy (On Dialogue, 1996), is a structured and attentive conversation that has set rules, allowing different perspectives to be presented and acknowledged.

Benefits

Dialogue creates a personal, pleasant atmosphere in the classroom. Students get to know each other better and develop the feeling that they can speak freely, which leads to connectedness and contributes to their well-being. Moreover, dialogue is an excellent way to discuss sensitive topics in class and to integrate various transferable skills in your course, including research, analysis, generating solutions, collaboration, oral communication, presentation, reflection and resilience.

Mental health challenges are a major concern among students in higher education. One promising approach to fostering student well-being is the integration of dialogue as a teaching method.

In 2023, Karin Nijenhuis was awarded a two-year Comenius Senior Fellowship. Lecturers from all Humanities Faculty institutes and the African Studies Centre Leiden have been trained in the dialogue method and they have integrated dialogue in their courses. Together they form the Leiden University Dialogue in Education Network (LUDIEN).

A teachers' module has also been developed, and Honours students have been trained as dialogue facilitators.

See the poster (PDF)

Digital Assessment team
Coirdinator Digital Assessment - IFZ

Summary

Ans is the digital assessment software of the university. It can be used to host summative and formative tests. It offers a user-friendly interface for students and teachers. Easily create new exams or start building a question bank with reusable questions for upcoming years.

The digital assessment team at ECOLe will gladly help you with digitalising your own exam and can even do this for you if you wish.

Capabilities

• Automate the grading process. Closed questions are automatically graded;
• Distribute manual correction work between colleagues and grade the distributed work simultaneously;
• Avoid having to decipher handwriting. Students can also better structure their answers with the open-ended questions' text editor;
• Build a database of both questions and complete exams, which are easily re-usable.

Additionally, you can improve the quality of your exams. After each exam, detailed analyses on the quality of your exam as a whole, and of the individual questions become available and you can make changes accordingly.

See the poster (PDF)

Using AI to critically analyse a historical source.

Lionel Laborie
Assistant Professor in Early Modern History - FGW

Students use AI whether we like it or not and it’s only getting better and better.

Even if you do not have an interest in artificial intelligence, I think we all need to learn how to integrate it into our teaching to know what it is capable of and to stay on top of the game.

Rationale

Students use AI for their assignments. I wanted to explore the possibilities with them and make them aware of the risk of hallucinations and other limitations.

The assignment

I gave my students a fake eighteenth century newspaper article generated by ChatGPT without telling them. I asked them to fact check its content and to analyse it critically to see what would happen. Only at the end of the discussion did I tell them that it was a fake generated by ChatGPT.

The outcome

All students thought the primary source was real. They spent 15 minutes researching its context, the main facts, protagonists etc. AI gave them opposite/contradictory answers, sometimes claiming it had located "the source" in an archive, sometimes suggesting fake literature on it.

See the poster (PDF)

A student-led board game creation project for a course on Governance

Hitomi Koyama
University lecturer- LIAS

Summary

The concept of a state is abstract and intangible. I wanted to come up with a project that encourages students to weave together insights from existing scholarship on state-formation and nation-building into a fun project of growing a state.

I assigned readings that explain how states exercise power by legitimate monopoly of violence; by nurturing healthy population with welfare; how war-making and state-building go hand-in-hand, and how emergency can concentrate power in the hands of states. I asked student groups to start drawing a state to observe how their image of the state becomes more scary the more they learn about how violence, order, and governmentality go hand-in-hand

Results

Students had to explain in their own words how state power works for the presentation. Working on the project as a group facilitated students to think more concretely and grapple with theory. After the project, students were able to articulate better how the state power infiltrates our everyday lives.

Some groups focused on legitimacy, where a corruption scandal card makes the player have to go few steps backward instead of forward. Others focused on how building public health infrastructure results in boosting of healthy tax-paying population, making it a plus.

See the poster (PDF)

Activating teaching and flexible learning pathways

Arnout van Ree
Lecturer International Studies - FGW

Het platform in action

The existing Science Skills Platform at the Faculty of Science offers students a versatile and engaging digital learning environment, aimed at the sustainable development of skills they need during their studies and after graduation. Thanks to its modular structure, students can shape personalised skills-learning pathways. Each skills module begins with an explanation of the relevant theory, followed by practical examples and then opportunities for application.

The advantages

• Students can acquire knowledge about the skills outside of contact hours, allowing for greater depth during in-person sessions;
• Lecturers are better able to respond to students' needs throughout the learning process;
• Students achieve the learning objectives with better results and demonstrate greater independence.

See the poster (PDF)

Carrying difficult conversations from class to the public realm

Noa Schonmann
Assistant professor, International Relations of the Middle East - LIAS

In short

The course comprised of a series of seminar sessions introducing students to milestone events and select themes in the century-long conflict, from both the Israeli and the Palestinian historical perspectives. Each class was topped by a practical workshop guiding students through the challenges of ethically conducting and producing interview-conversations for audio broadcasting.

This foundation prepared students to collectively produce a series of podcasts. Supported by FGW’s dedicated MediaLab+ staff, our 30 students worked with great enthusiasm to research and produce six interview-podcast episodes that brought them into deep and difficult conversations with people living through the conflict and whose views challenged students’ preconceptions.

Results

The result is ‘Radio Palestine/Israel’. Launched in February 2025, the podcast tunes into voices from the region to explore what values and experiences shape people’s political stances, how they opt to express their political voices, what’s at stake when their voices challenge consensus, and what they seek to achieve by speaking out.

Striving to make sense of the cacophony of contentious voices that erupted after 7 October, the series asks what voices dominate public discourses over Palestine/Israel, and which get sidelined or silenced? How can voices break through the noise and can bring lasting change? How can we craft our own political voices and make them heard?

• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Apple Podcasts

See the poster (PDF)

Supporting programme development

Jurriaan Witteman 
Assistant professor - LUCL

Summary

Developing BA/MA programmes requires having a vision about the goals of programmes. The Senior Teaching Qualification assists lecturers in obtaining such a vision.

• By participating in the Senior Teaching Qualification training, we developed a better understanding of how to develop high quality learning lines and programmes.
• By actively participating in the SKO sessions, exchanging thoughts about programme development with colleagues and commenting on each other's portfolio, lecturers will be better equipped to develop programmes.

Results

Having completed the Senior Teaching Qualification programme, lecturers will be better able to assist in developing high quality programmes.

See the poster (PDF)

Timely opportunity to reflect on your own teaching vision and learning

Georgiana Balau
Lecturer International Studies

The programme

The SKO programme is a bridge towards new inspiring teaching perspectives. It is worthwhile to embark on such a journey of discovery to benefit you, your colleagues and students. During the programme, you:

• Work on the SKO portfolio
• Participate in the SKO Inspiration Sessions
• Further develop your vision on teaching & learning

Results

• Collaborative tasks and valuable peer feedback
• Enriched discussions with colleagues on e.g., assessment
• Challenged perspectives with novel didactic strategies
• Rewarding overall learning experience

See the poster (PDF)

Yann Ryan
Lecturer - LUCDH & LUCAS

Summary

I created an interactive course book to teach data analysis and visualization to beginners. The goal was to make an interactive resource to teach coding, which students could follow alongside in the class and reference later.

As a solution, I used the open-source platforms Quarto and Shinylive. Quarto is a publishing platform for creating, amongst other types of documents, web-published books. Shinylive was used to embed interactive code chunks in a Quarto book.

There are many interactive code teaching platforms available, but these are costly. Using Quarto and Shinylive meant I could create my own bespoke version, completely for free, as the code runs directly in the reader’s browser

Results

This all really helped the course to run smoothly: what worked best was to have students complete a chapter at home and note down any places they got stuck. We then went over any problems in the class.

I think students appreciated the longer book format, which meant I could elaborate on concepts, provide additional explanations, and even use diagrams and cartoons to help explain things. It also allowed me to tailor it to my students and make it a bit more personal and interesting with examples that speak to them.

You can see (and use) last year’s book here: https://yann-ryan.github.io/infovis-course/

See the poster (PDF)

Strengthening the connection between secondary and higher education

Petra Boudewijn
vaksteunpunt Nederlands

Marion Elenbaas
vaksteunpunt Moderne Vreemde Talen

Would you like to share your expertise with secondary school teachers and students? Are you organising an activity that might also be of interest to them? Get in touch with the Vaksteunpunten.

Our mission

The Vaksteunpunten form the vital link between secondary school teachers of Dutch and modern foreign languages and the researchers and lecturers of language and culture programmes at the Faculty of Humanities. They identify needs from the field, serve as a source of information, and organise their own activities for teachers and students — focusing on subject-specific professional development and early engagement with the content of language and culture studies.

Many of our activities are organised in collaboration with the Education Network South Holland. For more information, visit: onderwijsnetwerkzuidholland.nl (Dutch website)

Our activities

• Expertise Sessions for Language Teachers (September)
• Profile Choice Sessions for vwo3 students (January)
• Alternative Reading List Awards
• Book Workshops for Language Teachers

See the poster (PDF)

Matthijs Westera                
Assistant professor – LUCL  

Masha Kunakhovich
Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology student

In short

We experimented with AI-generated feedback on students’ weekly assignments. We also collected students’ opinions about AI in education in general.

Disclaimer: There are many concerns associated with generative AI. Here, we focus solely on the educational aspects. Our findings are anecdotal.

Findings

Setting up a good AI tutor

• Requires extensive pedagogical expertise
• Demands subject matter knowledge
• Is a lot of work

Misconceptions in the AI debate

• Education as 'information transfer'
• Problems AI feedback solves are partly perceived rather than real
• AI is rarely the best solution

Recommendations

Check:

• What problem would AI solve?
• Is it really a problem?
• Is there a better solution?

Examples

• Fewer graded assignments.
• Different feedback (“Keep it up!”).
• Question hour.
• Follow-up assignment (self- & peer-feedback).
• Community, self-confidence.

See the poster (PDF)