Science Skills Platform
How do you fulfill a chairing position during a team meeting? How do you visualise a dataset for a presentation? How do you write the introduction to a scientific article? All Science students can find the answers to these and many more questions in the 100+ skill modules on the digital Science Skills Platform.
As a teacher, you can easily integrate the skill modules into your teaching to provide students with skill support that is relevant for your course. This also allows you to make the 13 shared transferable skills more visible in your education, helping students prepare for their transition to the job markt more consciously.
With the Science Skills Platform, students work on their transferable skills in the context of their own study programme and prepare for a smoother transition to the job market. Because they can do so independently, it does not come at the expense of time you can spend on course-specific teaching.
The available templates, step-by-step plans and checklists provide students with practical guidance when working on an assignment or when preparing a lecture or workgroup. Use of the platform is always recommended but voluntary, and does not count for ECTS.
Benefits of using the platform in your course
Many Science teachers have already integrated skill modules into their course in the past and report several benefits.
- The extra support enhances the quality of the students' final products;
- It is easier to explicitly encourage skill development in a course;
- It is easier to provide more effective feedback by referring students to the modules.
The Science Skills Platform has been evaluated during several large pilot studies among Bachelor students. During these pilots, the use of the platform was voluntary and not taken into account during grading. First year students and third year Bachelor students of Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences as well as students from the Biology minor Molecular Biotechnology greatly appreciated the platform. In addition, students felt more skilled and obtained higher grades for their writing assignments.
The platform was funded by the Faculty of Science and the Leiden Teachers' Academy. It was developed by the Science Skills Team consisting of Wybrigje de Vries, Lisann Brincker and Marjo de Graauw. They continuously work together with teachers, students and student assistants.
The development of the Science Skills Platform and toolkit materials is still ongoing. The modular structure of the platform makes it easy to develop new modules and materials to meet the constantly changing needs of teachers and students.
Do you have an idea for a new module? Contact seeds@science.leidenuniv.nl!
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The Science Skills Platform is a digital skill learning environment built in Brightspace. -
The platform is structured along skill domains (A), modules and chapters to offer support for each part of a skill. Interactive images (B) are incorporated throughout the platform.. -
The Language module in the General communication domain (A) contains handy tips for writing professional paragraphs (B). -
Interactive images in the Collaboration domain help students get to know different responsibilties. -
This step-by-step how to helps students create a conceptual framework for their research. -
Students can use this how to for defining useful search queries while doing their literature research. -
Students can compare different examples to learn about slide presentation guidelines.
Integrate skills and skill support in your teaching
Teachers do not have access to the platform automatically.
If you cannot access this Science Skills Platform page, you can request access to the platform by contacting us through seeds@science.leidenuniv.nl.
All Science students gain access automatically from the start until the end of their enrollment at our faculty.
The platform is already quite extensive and finding what you are looking for can be difficult. We are happy to give you an (online) tour of the platform and answer any questions you might have.
Contact seeds@science.leidenuniv.nl to schedule a meeting.
Contact seeds@science.leidenuniv.nl for help with linking relevant skill modules to your existing course materials, like Brightspace pages, assignment guidelines or lectures.
We can also support you in developing new materials in which skills play a big role.
Teacher toolkit is coming!
We are currently working on a teacher toolkit that helps you quickly integrate skills and the relevant skill support in your teaching. This toolkit includes example assignments, activities and assessment rubrics.
You can already use the digital flyers (on the right) to refer students to relevant modules for common assignments and acitivities.
[Last update: August 2025]