core task

Education

Our Education has already amply proved its soundness. Current policies require little adjustment. Points of attention for the coming years are monitoring the changes in Flemish education regulations (e.g. hard cut-off, new learning objectives in secondary education), the opportunities and risks offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and monitoring the balance between the advantages of online education and the added value of campus presence. Together with the other Flemish universities, we continue to strive for a more flexible arrangement for the design of English-language programmes and English-language sections in Dutch-language programmes. We take a critical look at our educational offering, especially when launching new initiatives, which will also be necessary in the context of the rationalisation of university education urged by the government and an initiative expected from VLIR. We are also continuing to roll out our inter-university lifelong learning offer (the NOVA Academy), which should be given greater prominence. 
But the world is changing. The Education of the future will look different. New students come in with very different expectations, experience, background and track record than, say, 15 years ago. In terms of content, conceptually and even technologically, we are not always prepared for this and have to keep pace with new evolutions and developments whose effects we do not yet know. In the past, our education often focused on learning to absorb large amounts of knowledge. Meanwhile, knowledge and information are so extensive and at the same time so widely available, that students need to learn above all how to synthesise the correct scientific knowledge from the abundance of material in order to be able to answer their questions. This still requires a sufficiently solid basic knowledge and a critical scientific attitude to assess the value of available information. Knowledge and skill, it is a balance we will continue to work on in the coming years.
We pool our strengths to explore future questions and possibly, without rushing ahead, set up pilot experiments:

• We are learning to use AI systems that not only present us with challenges in student evaluations, but also offer unprecedented opportunities for things that were previously unachievable for a student in training. We give our students the right support to be able to use AI optimally in their later careers. There should be clear frameworks for how and at what stage of a course different AI applications have a place. 
• Diploma courses will no doubt continue to exist but we should also expect students to put together their own and diverse programme from what they find in different places, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and microcredentials. We have to decide what to offer ourselves and how to deal with what other universities offer.
• We increase the attractiveness of our programmes for (inter)national prospective students by optimising curriculum structure, programme and course unit naming, content and working methods.
• We actively explore which international programmes and English-language course units we can offer based on our strengths and demand in the international market in line with the policy on internationalisation.
• We need to accommodate the increasing diversity of the student population within our programmes. We bring together best practices from tutoring, honours programmes, self-directed learning and other forms of blended learning that we can use more widely for this purpose. This way, we can also offer more of a challenge to students who can handle it.
• We ensure proper and inclusive welcoming and guidance for students, educationally but also practically, socially and culturally. By not reserving this guidance exclusively for certain target groups (e.g. international students), we improve the connection between students.