About the project

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- University of the Future

Introduction

When we talk about engineering education nowadays and the road forward, we agree that our students need more than just disciplinary knowledge to be prepared to handle the societal challenges of the future. Engineers of the future need transdisciplinary skills, to know how to collaborate with each other, and how to communicate with other disciplines.

Goal

At the end of the 3-year long project (September 2025) we want to have a whitepaper on the Eindhoven University of Technology of 2050, a change plan that concretizes the steps that need to be taken to move from the current situation to the desired one, and to have established a wide and strong support base for the constructed vision among the stakeholders that we envision to play a crucial role in the ecosystem of the future university.

Converging and diverging

We divided the project in a divergence and convergence phase. During the convergence phase we collect all possible information through co-creation sessions with outside stakeholders, but also internal research and early benchmarking by the project team. This includes investigating what other university business and financing models exist, interviewing students about their experience with the current Bachelor program, making the costs of a CBL course more visible, and connecting to regional and national initiatives.

The Vision of 'Learning in the Innovation Hub' at TU/e

In today's rapidly evolving world, global challenges demand a new breed of engineers. These individuals, equipped with in-depth expertise, a system-level mindset, and an entrepreneurial spirit, will drive innovative solutions to real-world problems, leading to societal change and sustainability. This holistic and collaborative approach is at the core of TU/e's 'Learning in the Innovation Hub' project. This initiative focuses on the co-creation of responsible solutions by students, researchers, industry partners, societal organizations, policy makers, citizens, and others. By building and connecting open interdisciplinary thematic communities, TU/e's Innovation Space aims to inspire and equip the next generation of engineers and change-makers.

Why 'Learning in the innovation Hub'?

To further develop the education sector, TU/e intends to extend its strong collaboration with partners in its ecosystem. The growth of Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) demands that collaborations are not only sustained but also intensified, as more challenges need addressing, requiring more substantial, long-term partnerships. The collaborative approach also facilitates lifelong learning for professionals and makes TU/e more accessible for industry professionals seeking to update their skills.

Creating a vertical learning environment where students of different levels work together.

The Strategy for 'Learning in the Innovation Hub'

The vision is to create thematic ecosystems, involving a network of external partners via strategic partnerships, thereby facilitating interdisciplinary research of academic staff at TU/e and other institutes. With diverse learners from bachelor's to Ph.D. students, TU/e aims to offer a series of challenges on the same theme. In this agile system, rigorous knowledge interrelates with research and education, fostering students' professional identity and enhancing their employability.

The project encompasses three core sub-projects: setting up an 'ideal' thematic ecosystem, extending the current Art & Design ecosystem, and creating a community of practice for all thematic ecosystems on campus.

Setting up the 'ideal' thematic ecosystem: This sub-project involves identifying and analyzing the best practices of thematic ecosystems available on campus and benchmarking against other universities' thematic ecosystems. Co-creation sessions will be used to define a structure for setting up challenges and develop a structure for vertical learning.
Extending the current Art & Design ecosystem: Collaborating with regional knowledge institutes, this sub-project aims to develop an elective course that integrates Art & Design challenges into STEM education, transitioning our educational focus from STEM to STEAM.
Creating a community of practice: By identifying stakeholders from across the university, regular meetings and knowledge-sharing sessions will be organized to facilitate collaboration and learning across the various thematic ecosystems on campus.

Goals

With Challenge-Based Learning at its core, TU/e innovation Space provides students and professionals with a platform to address societal issues in interdisciplinary teams. The goal is to establish thematic ecosystems that places continuous, interdisciplinary learning at the forefront, allowing students from all educational levels, researchers, and professionals to co-create challenges, shaping the CBL challenge agenda collaboratively. Besides, expanding our network and facilitate knowledge and experience exchange within the learning hub.

An integral part of the TU/e innovation Space is the Entrepreneurial Student Journey. Currently, comprehensive support is provided to students through the TU/e Contest and their start-up journey. The goal is on the one hand to encourage professionals to collaborate with students, developing an entrepreneurial mindset as part of Life Long Learning. On the other hand, to bring the Entrepreneurial Learning and Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) activities more together within the overall learning hub.

Making extracurricular learning visible

Extracurricular student teams at TU/e are a rich learning environment where students develop competences relevant to the engineer of the future. They work interdisciplinary and learn collaboratively with students from different disciplines and the larger Brainport ecosystem. They develop solutions for challenges of socio-technical relevance, helping them explore the type of engineers they aspire to be and their position in society.

Learning in these student teams is a unique learning environment because of four aspects:

Flexibility: Students have the freedom to choose a team (or teams) that connects to their personal/professional values.
Experimentation: Students are able to experiment with different roles, tasks, and responsibilities within teams, allowing them to explore their interests, and adjust their understanding of their vision and professional identity.
Self-directed learning: Students choose if, when, and how to participate in student teams (e.g., number of dedicated hrs.), and how much emphasis they want to place on personal and professional development.
Intrinsic motivation: Students are driven to join teams for a variety of reasons, including the willingness to contribute to societal challenges and to develop their competences in an authentic context.

Despite the above, students have expressed difficulty making their learning and overall development (i.e., skills, knowledge, attitudes) during their time in a student team explicit and visible. This has implications during and after the engagement in the student team. Making learning and competence development more visible/explicit during students’ engagement with the teams could help students to maximize their learning (e.g., connecting specific ambitions/learning goals to activities within the team and the Brainport ecosystem). For life after the student team, this can help them to bring a stronger professional identity when they join the working life.

The project aims at reaching a better understanding of learning and competence development in extracurricular student teams, and to identify, pilot, and evaluate possible ways to support and make learning explicit/visible (for the student and others).

An iterative design-based approach

To achieve our goal, we are following an iterative design-based approach, with six interrelated activities aimed at understanding, identifying, designing, piloting, and evaluating.

Understanding: Why, What and How students learn in extracurricular learning environments.
Identifying: (Digital) tools, educational practices, roles, and other elements relevant to support the competence development of extracurricular learning by students in student teams.
Designing: Educational interventions to make learning in extracurricular (EC) student teams more explicit/visible & support the competence development of students.
Piloting: Educational intervention(s) to support the learning & competence development of extracurricular students.
Evaluating: The impact/value of educational intervention(s) to support the learning & competence development of extracurricular students.

Our team

Chantal Brans

Chantal Brans is the program manager education innovation and the manager of the future university project. With her background in psychology she especially invested in the change process within the institute.

Marcello Sala

Marcello Sala is the project leader of ‘Designing the University of the Future’ within TU/e innovation Space. With his background in industrial engineering, he is mainly focused on new business models for the university.

Dominique Fürst

Dominique Fürst is the project leader of the partner collaborations within the project. She is responsible for the current collaborations with the partners and is able to test the future directions with the current partners directly.

Ana Valencia

Ana Valencia is an educational design researcher and project leader of the project “Extracurricular Learning & Competence Development” at Eindhoven University of Technology. She combines her passion for innovation, design thinking, and education in her present project. Next to this, she supports the innovation of education at TU/e, and particularly on the topic of assessment as learning in Challenge-Based Learning.

Eugenio Bravo

Eugenio Bravo is an educational researcher in the project "Extracurricular Learning & Competence Development" at Eindhoven University of Technology. He has been involved in the implementation of Challenge-Based Learning courses in engineering higher education. His research interests are engineering education innovation and competence development.

Bart Koppelmans

Bart Koppelmans is a student assistant for the coordination of the “Student Teams and Extracurricular Learning” program. With a combined background of Computer Science and Innovation Management, he focuses on learning in practice.

Ines Lopez Arteaga

Ines Lopez Arteaga is a Full Professor at the Dynamics and Control group of the Mechanical Engineering Department and Chair of Acoustic and Noise Control at Eindhoven University of Technology and Dean Bachelor College since 2020. In her role as Dean Bachelor College, she has the first task to redesign and refine the curriculum that is successfully implemented in 2012. With this task, the future engineer and university are an important topic.

Kathinka Rijk

Kathinka Rijk has a MSc in health sciences and a PhD in pedagogy. She is a strategic policy officer on education in the staff office of the Executive Board of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands. Topics she focusses on include the TU/e vision on education, student employability and professional development, diversity and inclusion, honors education and Challenge-Based Learning.

Isabelle Reymen

Isabelle Reymen is the scientific director of TU/e innovation Space and professor design of innovation ecosystems. She started TU/e innovation Space with the ambition to structurally change education and after 7 years she is the director of an award winning team with never-ending ambitions.