UM Education Days 2026: registration is open!

Registration - 9:00-9:30

Welcome to the 5th edition of the UM Education Days!

Opening - 9:30-10:30

At the UM Education Days, Donna Carroll (EDLAB) and Gideon Koekoek (FSE) will guide the programme as hosts, and we’re delighted that Rector Magnificus Jan Smits will open the event.

Expect a session full of lively engagement and meaningful connections that set the stage for the next two days. 

Some playful reflections await…

Session round 1 - 10:45-12:00

• Creativity – not a buzz word, but a skill, by Arie van der Lugt

Creativity is hot, and creative thinking is a must. But what is all the fuss really about? At its heart, creativity is simply the production of novel, appropriate ideas across human activity, from science to everyday life. Ideas must be novel, different from what has been done before, but they cannot be simply bizarre. They must be appropriate to the problem or opportunity.

Creativity is not a given, but there is much you can do to nurture it. In this workshop, we introduce the creative process through brief exercises. We then explore what people need to be creative and why it can be difficult to observe the world with a fresh perspective. Finally, we will try a number of creative thinking techniques to break set patterns of thinking.

By the end of the workshop, you will have a clearer understanding of what creativity is and how to enhance your own creative problem-solving skills.

• Build your own educational card game: lessons from a linear algebra card game, by Martijn Boussé, Xiaoling Zhang, Max Sondag and Philippe Dreesen

Game-based learning is often discussed, but less often designed and tried out in practice. In this session, we show how ludodidactical principles can be used to design meaningful, active learning activities within existing courses and time constraints.

We start from a concrete example: a Linear Algebra Card Game used in tutorials to help students explain, connect and discuss abstract concepts. Together with students who co-developed the game, we show how and why it works, without requiring prior knowledge of linear algebra.

The main part of the session is hands-on. Participants work in small groups to design a simple game or game-inspired activity for their own course. The focus is on experimenting with ideas and learning from each other.

Participants will leave with inspiration, a first design draft, and a starting point to explore playful, active learning in their own context.

• Feedback without friction: designing reflection that actually supports learning, by Liesbeth Kester and Maryam Asoodar

In many curricula, feedback and reflection are carefully embedded, yet students often experience them as bureaucratic requirements rather than meaningful learning opportunities. This session explores how they can be redesigned as learning infrastructure, not add-ons, but core elements that help students orient themselves, make sense of progress and regulate their learning over time.

The session is interactive and aimed at tutors, mentors and students. Participants engage with key design principles explaining why feedback and reflection often fail to stimulate competence development, and how programmatic assessment can encourage instrumental behaviour. Using short cases, we explore where friction arises and how elements such as portfolios, coaching structures and the timing of feedback shape engagement.

In the second part, tutors and mentors apply these principles in a short redesign exercise, in co-creation with students and guided by the workshop leaders. They identify one activity and explore how a small, feasible change can turn it into genuine learning support.

Participants leave with a practical design lens and a concrete action point to redesign feedback and reflection in their own course or programme, while students learn how to engage more effectively.

• AI, new tools and technologies for the PBL classroom – Presentations of EDLAB grant-winning projects with a focus on AI & learning, and tools & technology,​​ by Walter Jansen, Alice Pan, Louise David, Lutz Krebs, Matthias Wibral, Henrique Marcos, Rohan Nanda, Bart Mennink and Jairaj Gopalakrishnan

The impact of GenAI and new technologies on education has triggered many UM teaching staff to design, integrate and try out new features in the PBL-classroom. Over the last two years, EDLAB has awarded several innovation and research grants to projects devoted to the topic of AI and new technological tools. 

During this session, grant winners will showcase their project ideas, methods, and results and respond to any questions or additional ideas you may have. Project topics include AI & assessment, AI as a coach, AI & academic writing and ethical use of AI, interactive websites, digital platforms and games.

Have a look at these and other EDLAB grant-winning projects here: current and previous.

Lunch – 12:00-13:30

Exchange your insights from the first session and get to know your colleagues while enjoying a delicious warm lunch!

Group photo in the park – 13:15-13:30

Session round 2 - 13:30-14:45

• Educating future leaders: why personal leadership training belongs in education, by Floortje Stijnen, Mariah Kuijer, Sherife Su Mehmetaliogullari and Julia Jagodzinska 

   

Problem-Based Learning asks a lot of students: taking responsibility, collaborating effectively, navigating uncertainty and staying engaged under pressure. These are not just academic skills, but leadership skills. Yet while PBL relies on them, they are rarely taught explicitly.

In this session, four students reflect on their experience with personal leadership training in education and argue that recurring PBL challenges, such as low engagement, stress and unproductive group dynamics, make leadership training a core element of education.

The session is interactive. Participants reflect on challenges in their own context and explore, through guided exercises, how these can be addressed as opportunities for leadership development. Using examples such as the Drama Triangle, we show how group roles can shift towards ownership, accountability and open communication.

Participants leave with concrete strategies to improve group dynamics and support the development of engaged, responsible and resilient learners.

• Flourishing in education, by Philipp Röhlich

In higher education, we increasingly focus on student wellbeing, and rightly so. Many students struggle, and as educators we want to support them. At the same time, teaching can be demanding, with high workloads, administrative pressures and emotional labour affecting educators’ own wellbeing.

This session invites participants to reflect on wellbeing from a scientific perspective. Drawing on research from positive psychology, clinical psychology and emotion science, we explore how emotions shape learning, motivation and engagement.

Rather than offering simple solutions, the session provides a framework for thinking about wellbeing in education. We discuss what it means to flourish in higher education and how this relates to both student and educator experiences.

The session includes short inputs, discussion and reflection on your own teaching practice.

• Inclusive by design, challenge by choice: designing courses that work for everyone and push them further, by Iris Burks

How do you balance inclusivity with academic rigour in university teaching? This interactive workshop explores Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a practical way to design courses that welcome all students while still encouraging them to stretch and grow.

We will focus on a few key questions. How can UDL help us respond to diversity without lowering expectations? What is the difference between a barrier that holds students back and a challenge that helps them develop? Together, we will look at how to design learning experiences where students feel supported, take meaningful risks and test their limits.

Drawing on real examples, discussion and hands-on activities, the presenters will share UDL approaches from their own practice. You will leave with practical ideas you can use in your teaching, helping you create courses that are flexible, accessible and intellectually demanding.

• Bridging teaching and research – insights and inspiration, by Lena Gromotka, Oscar van den Wijngaard and Kai Heidemann

What if the connection between your teaching and research could become one of the most rewarding and manageable parts of your academic work? This interactive session puts your experience at the centre, offering practical ideas to strengthen that connection in your daily work.

In the EDLAB project “Mend the Gap”, we interviewed colleagues across UM and explored the literature on the teaching–research relationship. In this session, we share key insights and explore approaches that resonate with real academic practice.

During the session, you will:

• discover practical strategies to better integrate research into your teaching, and teaching into your research
• learn from real examples of colleagues
• exchange experiences and ideas in an interactive setting

Whether you want to refresh your teaching or reflect on your approach, this session offers space to learn, share and grow.

• Game Arcade: play and learn, by Kirsten Kleijkers-Peetoom, Martijn Boussé, and Rico Möckel

All work and no play makes learning a dull affair. And teaching too. Educators from various faculties have taken this notion to heart and experimented with a wide range of games and playful learning activities: making a robot move while operating only one its four legs quickly teaches you the importance and complexities of collaboration; playing dominos with calculus concepts helps you zoom in and out of the bigger picture of formulas and theorems; mapping the journey of our students exposes the highs and lows of a programme.  

In this session you can discover and play with these games, and the colleagues who masterminded them will explain why and how they created the games, and will inspire you to explore the possibilities of using or developing games within your own teaching practice. 

Tea & coffee break - 14:45-15:15

Deep thoughts and dilemmas - 15:15-16:15

This year we'll propose a new type of session titled Deep thoughts and dilemmas. 

Tempus fugit: time flies. So much is changing in higher education and there seems to be so little time to keep up and adapt. Let alone sit back and understand what is really going on and what it means to you, as learner and as teacher. 

That is why with this edition of the UM Education days we are introducing a new type of session, called Deep thoughts & dilemmas. After a day filled with ideas and inspiration for your teaching and learning practice, come to one of the small-scale conversations and learn and share about the bigger pictures that shape that practice. Kick-started in a playful way but diving right into the heart of the topic, these sessions are like the eye of the storm, an opportunity to discuss with others what it is that really matters to you about learning and teaching.  

No panel, no debate, no slides. Just you and your fellow learners and teachers on a joint exploration of some of the deep thoughts and dilemmas in and around education. 

• Who needs shortcuts when the journey is the destination?

What does AI tell us about the motivation for learning and teaching? We talk a lot about promoting ‘good use’ and preventing ‘abuse’. Critical issues, but there may be more to the phenomenon.

It is time to look in the mirror and ask why we and others are tempted by the shortcuts AI offers, and what that reveals about the education we provide and seek.

• The courage to let go

Across 50 years of teaching and learning through PBL and CCCS, UM has offered a bold alternative to top-down, teacher-centred education focused on narrow, summative assessment. Instead of consuming knowledge, learning at UM is organised around its active construction.

Yet at the end of a course, semester or programme, we assess and endorse what has been learned. Is that fair? Or should we have the courage to let new knowledge go where ours has not gone before?

• Student learning – who’s responsible?

If students expect knowledge to be delivered and teachers expect it to be constructed, who is responsible for learning? As higher education increasingly positions students as customers, expectations shift. Learning risks becoming something to receive, rather than something to do.

Yet real learning is effortful, uncertain and often uncomfortable. It cannot be guaranteed. So what are students responsible for, and what falls to educators? How can we better align these expectations to support meaningful learning?

• The tutor paradox 

In Problem-Based Learning, the ideal tutor is a subtle facilitator, guiding discussion without dominating it. But reality is less clear-cut. Tutors are often passionate academics, with knowledge they want to share. Step too far into guidance, and the session risks becoming a lecture. Stay too quiet, and frustration sets in for both students and tutors.

What are students missing when tutors are expected to hold back? And how can the tutor’s expertise enhance the learning experience? Do we need to rethink this pivotal role in PBL?

Drinks

Breakfast - 8:45-9:45

PBL avant la lettre – Origins of the medieval university and its pedagogy, by Walter Jansen

What do medieval university education and our PBL-CCCS model have in common? What can we learn from early university pedagogy? This session explores schooling traditions and the rise of universities in the Middle Ages.

Discover disputations, double truths and rediscoveries that shaped the medieval university. We will see that the development of autonomy, analytical inquiry and engaging with conflicting views were as important then as they are now.

To understand the context in which early universities emerged, we move back and forth through European history, highlighting key political and cultural transformations.

We will see that the development of autonomy, analytical inquiry and engaging with conflicting views were as important then as they are now.

Session round 4 - 10:00-11:15

• How to let your students voice their thoughts, by Berbke Hermans

Why do some students speak up while others stay silent? And what can you do to change that?

In this interactive session, we explore how voice, language, space and relationships shape participation in class. Through hands-on exercises, participants experience the challenges of speaking in public and reflect on how factors such as group size, power relations, cultural background, language and personality influence who takes up space.

Working in small groups, you will experiment with simple ways to create safer, more inclusive learning environments. Observing is also possible. You will leave with a clearer sense of your presence as a speaker, a better understanding of what might hold students back, and practical ways to invite more voices into the room.

• Boosting student discussions in tutorials, by John Harbord

   

Engaging students in meaningful, genuine conversations in the context of PBL is not an easy task. The perceived complexities of good classroom management mean that when they talk at all, students almost always address the whole class. Many tutors at UM may not be aware of the benefits of techniques such as cross-grouping and pyramid grouping, or may even be reluctant to put students into threes for discussion. 

A wide variety of techniques, however, are available to teachers/tutors to arrange how and between whom classroom discussion takes place (classroom management). These techniques have been extensively used in other student-centred teaching methods, such as communicative language learning, but have been largely neglected in PBL. As a result, opportunities for building group dynamics and ensuring the participation of quiet students are missed. 

In this session, using experiential activities, you'll experience that thoughtful tutor interventions in classroom management can boost discussion and participation, increase the number of perspectives discussed, and, at the same time, be student-centred. Participants will come away with a range of techniques and tools to facilitate good PBL discussion in class. 
 

• Climate change belongs in your course – Yes, even yours, by Andrew Oringer, Caterina Cavaliere and Lina Reininghaus

Climate change is not just a topic for science or policy courses. It belongs across disciplines, but how do you bring it into your own teaching?

In this session, we start with student perspectives. Two FSE students share their experiences of climate-related teaching across faculties, what engaged them, and what felt like a box-ticking exercise. Educators listen first, then join the conversation.

Participants then work in cross-faculty groups on a hands-on exercise, identifying where a climate lens could enrich a course. We share ideas and connect them to the UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development framework.

The session closes with a practical question: what could you do in your teaching tomorrow? You will leave with concrete ideas and a fresh student perspective on meaningful climate education in practice.

• New education innovations at UM faculties – Presentations of recent EDLAB grant-winning projects, by Alice Pan, Karen Könings, Anna Harris, Jairaj Gopalakrishnan, Diogo Cotta, Rikus Nieuwenhuis, Jenny Schell and Teun Dekker

Problem-based learning can be a great testing ground for new educational ideas and stimulate teaching staff to develop innovative and experimental educational design, delivery & assessment. Over the last two years, EDLAB has awarded several grants focusing on education innovations in the PBL classroom. During this session, recent grant winners will showcase their project ideas, methods and results and respond to any questions and ideas you may have. 

The projects cover a wide spectrum of topics from Global Citizenship Education and self-regulation to PBL-training, evaluation practices and authentic reflection and games to elevate everyday teaching.

Have a look at these and other EDLAB grant-winning projects here: current and previous.

• Using VR technology to increase empathy and emotional engagement, by Katja Shcherbakova, Stefan Bos and Anna-Lena Hoh

* Please note this session takes place in the Inner City Library, Grote Looiersstraat 17

Educators increasingly seek ways to help students engage with complex social issues such as financial stress, inequality and decision-making under pressure. Traditional teaching can explain these concepts but often struggles to convey their emotional and cognitive dimensions.

In this workshop, we explore how immersive technologies can support these learning goals, drawing on research by Stefan Bos (SBE) on VR-based perspective-taking. Participants experience a financial-stress simulation and take part in a structured debrief to examine its pedagogical value and student impact.

We also discuss when immersive experiences add value, as well as practical and pedagogical limitations such as accessibility, preparation and facilitation. You will leave with concrete criteria to evaluate how immersive technologies can support your learning objectives.

Session round 5 – 11:45-13:00

• Teaching with Flow: using social pedagogy as your teaching superpower, by Hüseyin Sakalli

Despite many pedagogical theories and professional development opportunities, teaching is still often seen as something you either ‘get’ or not. ‘If teaching is difficult, you are not doing it right.’ This message can unsettle new teachers. What should they do when students struggle to stay focused, read attentively or contribute with engagement and precision? Too often, tutors fill these gaps themselves rather than relying on the capabilities of their groups.

This session aims to relieve teachers of that burden. It presents a concrete, hands-on approach to help students collaborate effectively through role-play. We practise challenging teaching scenarios and connect them to theories from social pedagogy, and make them work in practice.

• Critically exploring GenAI-tools for literature discovery, by Anna-Lena Hoh and Roberto Cruz Martinez

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity are changing how we search for and engage with academic literature. They promise speed and accessibility, but how reliable are they, and do they live up to expectations?

In this interactive workshop, we explore and critically assess the use of GenAI tools for literature discovery. Participants take part in hands-on activities with selected tools and evaluate the results, considering their strengths, limitations and ethical implications.

By the end of the session, you will better understand how to assess AI outputs, recognise their advantages and limitations, and reflect on their responsible use in your academic practice.

• Rethinking MECC exams – designing meaningful assessment, by Rebecca du-Pont, Charlotte Heuser, Luisa Reichwein and Emily von König

Assessment plays a central role in shaping learning experiences. At Maastricht University, the shift in assessment practices during and after the pandemic has led to a renewed reliance on closed-book exams at the MECC. Within the EDLAB Student Advisory Board, concerns have emerged about this format.

Research highlights the limitations of closed-book exams, particularly in assessing critical thinking, creativity and other complex competencies. These formats often struggle to align with UM’s vision of meaningful, authentic assessment, prompting a re-evaluation of how controlled examinations are designed.

In this interactive session, hosted by ESAB, students and staff come together to rethink assessment in controlled environments. After sharing student perspectives and innovative approaches, participants work in mixed groups to design and evaluate alternative exam formats.

This workshop invites participants to move beyond traditional exams and explore how assessment can better support meaningful learning.

• Engaging your audience with your message – the power of Ethos, Pathos and Logos, by Sueli Brodin and Oscar van den Wijngaard 

Capturing an audience can be a daunting task. When you want to share something that matters to you, so that it also matters to others, you cannot rely on enthusiasm or expertise alone. Why would others, such as your readers, viewers, colleagues or students, care?

Whether you are writing, composing a lecture or presentation, or preparing for a debate, there are three powerful ingredients you can use to engage your audience: credibility, passion and the quality of your reasoning. In other words, ethos, pathos and logos.

In this session, you will learn about these three concepts and put them to use in something you are working on, or want to work on but do not yet know where to begin. So if you want to communicate science, present academic findings, or tell a story that inspires your audience, join this session hosted by the editors of edUMinded, UM’s online magazine for teaching and learning.

• Game Arcade – play and learn, by Kirsten Kleijkers-Peetoom, Martijn Boussé, and Rico Möckel

All work and no play makes learning a dull affair. And teaching too. Educators from various faculties have taken this notion to heart and experimented with a wide range of games and playful learning activities. Making a robot move while operating only one of its four legs quickly reveals the importance and complexity of collaboration. Playing dominoes with calculus concepts helps you zoom in and out of the bigger picture of formulas and theorems. Mapping the journey of our students exposes the highs and lows of a programme.

In this session, you can discover and play these games. The colleagues who created them will explain why and how they developed them, and inspire you to explore the possibilities of using or designing games in your own teaching practice.

Wrap-up lunch – 13:00-14:00

The UM Education Days will close with a relaxed wrap-up lunch, a chance to sit down together, continue the conversations, and reflect on the day.