Joost Dijkstra (J.)

Since 2019 I work as Head of the Cluster Educational Development and Policy (EDaP). The cluster (a team of 5 experts) supports the Faculty Board in developing policy on topics related to education, assessment, quality assurance, teacher professionalization, and more. EDaP also support teaching staff in developing education, by offering broad educational expertise, as well as contributing to optimizing the organization of education and learning. This is done in close collaboration with the Office of Student Affairs and Marketing & Communication, but also with the clusters Research Support Office, Finance, and Information Management. In my view as Cluster Manager I strive for minimizing the bureaucracy and optimizing the primary process, i.e. education.

Quality improvement of higher education is my main fields of interest. Currently I am closely involved in the preparation for the Institutional Quality Audit on the topics of quality assurance, assessment, and staff development. Besides the institutional accreditation, I support programmes in the preparation of their accreditation by the Dutch accraditation organisation (NVAO).

I’m also engaged in the development of the university policy (framework) on student assessment and support schools, programme directors and boards of examiners with the implementation of their assessment policies.

I also enjoy contributing to various institutional projects such as Constructive Alignment of curricula, the University Teaching Qualification (BKO) as part of staff development, and Educational Leadership Careers. I’m proud of my role in facilitating and stimulating collaboration between schools and service centres.

From 2006 till 2015 I worked as educational researcher at the department of Educational Development & Research (Maastricht University, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences - FHML). In 2014 I defended my PhD thesis “Guidelines for designing programmes of assessment” about developing and validating guidelines for the design of assessment programmes using a programmatic (systems) approach. During this period I coordinated student assessment in the bachelor and master phase at FHML (medical curriculum) with a specific interest in Computerized Case-based Testing (CCT) of medical students. This is a key-feature approach test for students to assess clinical reasoning (mainly) during internships.