WSV Innovation Projects

This project aims at developing a multidisciplinary challenge-based learning (CBL) minor module of 15 EC on enterprise software for the integration of administrative processes. The minor will be offered in the academic year 2022/23 to students from the following programmes: International Business Administration (IBA), Public Administration (PA), Business Information Technology (BIT), Industrial Engineering & Management (IEM), and Communication Studies (COM), with the possibility to open it up also for other studies such as Technical Computer Science, Advanced Technology, and other similar studies. Additionally, we would like to explore the possibility to offer the minor for the training of professionals, with micro-certificates (comparable to the Business Administration Master course on B2B Marketing).

The main goal is to design a minor module with strong involvement from both businesses and public organisations, and a focus on how the major business and administrative processes of an organisation can be supported by enterprise software for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence (BI), workflow management, and the like. Students will learn which data is critical for organisations and how to make data-driven decisions based on it; they will get familiar with enterprise systems and learn how to automate and integrate business processes.

The minor will contain two study units focused on theory (4 EC each) and one study unit for the project (7 EC). One theory study unit will cover academic literature relevant to ERP systems (in relation to, e.g., Finance and Accounting, Human Resource Management, Warehouse Management, etc.), while the other study unit will cover aspects of Enterprise Information Systems (e.g., Business Process Management, Data Management, Business Intelligence, etc.). The main goal is that the theory study units provide the knowledge necessary to execute the project, on a weekly basis, in a manner that is independent of the software vendor for the project.

Based on the CBL model, the minor will include a project in which students need to propose a solution to a challenge posed by one or more organisations from the public and the private sector (to align the interests of the different study programmes). Some examples of topics that could be covered during the project include green & integrated mobility, energy transition, circularity in the constructions sector, smart healthcare, etc. To help with the design of the CBL aspects of the minor, we will involve the UT’s CBL advisors provided by CELT (Leonie Bosch-Chapel, or Frank van den Berg).

To support the practical part of the project, we will partner with SAP. Based on preliminary discussions, SAP is willing to provide our students with access to their software platform, give guest lectures, and offer the possibility of SAP certification. This collaboration would ensure that our students get relevant experience with one of the world’s leading providers of ERP systems and data integration tools, and have the ability to receive a certification that offers benefits for their future careers. Thus, the minor also aligns with the strategic goal of the UT to support the talent development of students.

Besides the focus on CBL, the minor will also include other teaching innovations. For example, providing hybrid education where students can work on their projects and get support from teaching staff online and on campus. This can be achieved by using applications such as Slack (which is already implemented in Module 3 IEM/BIT coordinated by Adina Aldea) where students can post their questions at any time during the day and can receive answers as soon as the teaching staff is available. Slack can also serve as a community-building platform where students can share ideas and help each other progress with their project, which aligns with the UT’s strategic goal of building communities.

- Contact person: Patricia Rogetzer

With this project we aim to apply innovations on interactivity and active learning in the areas of video-production and Challenge Based Learning to enhance the 30 EC preparatory minor of the M-EEM titled Towards Managing Sustainability in a Technological Context in order to improve the education in the minor and make it more attractive for prospective students. The idea is to extend the use of the interactive content to the M-EEM itself and thus contribute to innovative education and the professionalization of all M-EEM teachers. In this project we aim to make a start with what could become a multimedia database of key concepts, methods and theories that are characteristic of the M-EEM and can be applied in both the minor and the main M-EEM programme, though with different uses. In time and with a fair amount of videos/concepts this content can also be made available for other programmes.

- Contact person: Gül Özerol

Assessment is an important aspect of teaching and learning. Summative assessment, in form of exams, is used in most courses, since it provides a reliable method to assess whether students achieved the learning goals of a course. Exams can consist of open and closed questions, both of which have their advantages and disadvantages.

Closed questions, like multiple choice questions, are mostly suitable for testing the first three levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, i.e. remembering, understanding, and applying. Open questions, on the contrary, can be used to assess higher order thinking skills, like analyzing, evaluating, and creating. In an ideal world, the choice of the assessment method is based on this differentiation. However, in practice, other aspects, like the time it takes to correct an exam, also play an important role.

Multiple choice questions can be evaluated automatically in tools like Remindo (which is currently done on many UT’s Bachelor level courses with larger groups), which makes them more scalable for large courses. It is also easy to grade objectively, especially in cases where multiple assessors are involved. Therefore, we sometimes use multiple choice questions, even in cases when they are not considered to be the best available assessment methods from a scientific perspective.

In order to improve the objectivity, reliability, and efficiency of the assessment of open exam questions, IEBIS and the BMSLAB together developed the tool EasyGrader as part of a Comenius research project. EasyGrader is a grading assistance tool that is directly connected to Remindo and can cluster answers to open questions, based on their similarity and a list of keywords. The tool was tested with open-question exams by teachers from BMS. While they did like the interface and it made grading for them easier and faster than in Remindo itself, unfortunately, we found that there is little correlation between the clusters of similar student answers that EasyGrader generates and the assessment by teachers.

In research conducted since the end of the project, we found that using Transformer language, models to classify (rather than cluster) answers to open questions does correlate with teachers’ assessment and hence allows for more efficient and reliable assessment of open exam questions. In the proposed project, we want to operationalize this technology by building a corpus that

consists of open questions, student answers, and teachers’ assessment, based on existing exams and leveraging the assessment paradigm of the often-used grading model (nakijkmodel). We want to use this corpus to train a model to automatically classify students’ answers to open exam questions. Finally, we want to integrate this model into an enhanced version of EasyGrader, evaluate it with teachers, and provide the final version to teachers, in order to support them in their grading process.

- Contact person: Daniel Braun

This note proposes to organize a Minor Well-Being at the University of Twente, aimed at students who are not in the Bachelor Psychology or master-track of positive clinical psychology and technology (PCPT), and using ‘best practices’ in this subject area from the psychology curriculum. This subject of well-being is at the core of our psychology curriculum, and is closely related to the mission of the UT for shaping 2030.

“The University of Twente is the ultimate People-first University, with a personalised approach to talent development. The High Tech Human Touch approach of UT facilitates shared reflection on the way we work, relate to one another, and contribute to one another’s challenges and goals” (Shaping 2030, Mission UT). So, not only academic performance is important, but also personal growth and individual talents. Creative and effective applications and solutions to technological and societal issues can emerge only when people can take a step back and reflect after actively engaging with a problem. In order to gain insight into own values, talents and possible obstacles to grow further and perform better, we propose to develop this course. Well-being and personal growth are subjects that currently many students are interested in for both personal and professional reasons. The Minor can positively influence the well-being of students, thus educating resilient and wellrounded professionals. It can simultaneously instil awareness of the importance of well-being when designing the future and implementing solutions in their respective areas of study.

Recently, more attention and effort to improve student’s well-being have emerged in the academic world in general, and at the UT specifically. These efforts in general aim to increase well-being and reduce (the effects of) stress related to studies or related to personal life-event. In a broader sense, awareness of the importance of well-being has increased in society as a whole, but in many instances the ‘know how’ is lacking. Important challenges are: What is well-being? What can well-being do for us in life? How can we increase it personally, and how can we integrate it in society? How does technology play a role in well-being, and can we use technology to increase well-being? Can we use well-being to improve technology? And how does well-being relate to specific technological areas of expertise that students are studying? These questions, and more, are at the core of the research and teaching programmes of the section of Psychology, Health and Technology. We feel that now is the time to integrate this subject in the curriculum for a wider target group of students at the UT. Society is changing, with a stronger and more pervasive integration of technology that touches on almost all aspects of daily life, and society has become aware that mental health is more than simply the absence of psychological complaints or problems. We want to live in connection with others, in a healthy environment that is sustainable in natural resources, and in psychological, social, and physical well-being, and we want to have a sense of purpose and be able to pursue our goals.

These notions underline the importance to integrate education on well-being in the current societal and technological context, at our University of Twente.

- Contact person: E.J. de Bruin

Physiological measures, such as EDA, EMG and EEG play an increasingly significant role in applied Behavioural Sciences research. However, teaching physiological measures is currently very limited across the different BA and MA curricula, for several reasons:

• Apparatus is expensive (and often stationary), which limits the possibilities to teach by first-hand experience.
• Teachers are lacking background knowledge on functioning and application of sensors.
• Students lack the technical background to work with sensors, independently.

The general aim of the YLab project is to create a self-contained line of education for BMS programs, covering the complete research workflow, from making and programming sensors, analysing sensor data, to interpreting physiological signals in valid and useful ways. The first goal of the YLab project is to make it very easy to integrate physiological measures into existing courses. We will collect available teaching material and create an integrated course builder toolkit for physiological measures.

The most effective way of teaching methodological skills is to create a first-hand experience. The second goal of YLab is to create an opensource low-budget hardware/software platform for programmable sensor arrays and involve students in the development. The third goal is to generally raise the techno-literacy of our students by creating three new programming courses based on programmable sensor arrays in Python (Raspberry Pico/CircuitPython), data analysis (MNE-Python for EEG), and data visualization (R/Shiny). As a novelty, two of the courses are primers of only 1 EC, which can be very easily integrated into existing courses and therefore will be very widely applicable in Psychology and other BMS programs.

- Contact person: Martin Schmettow

In this project, we professionalise existing BMS educational material and extend it to include online web apps. We also aim to empower BMS teachers to make their own web apps.

Data analytics is taught using the framework of linear models. Because of a lack of textbooks on this topic suitable for behavioural and social science students, we've written our own textbook, available free of charge to anyone. The book could benefit from the professionalisation of presentation, layout, and availability in other formats than pdf, making it more accessible to both students and teachers. The approach used in the book could benefit from web applications (shiny apps) that could explain important concepts in an interactive and visual manner. We would like to integrate such apps directly into the textbook online, for instance using HTML rather than pdf. It would both benefit teaching and students. By teaching how to make web apps we can help teachers both to keep updating the material in the future and to make other apps that support their own teaching. It will involve Teaching professionalization, Talent development of students, and Learning facilities. It strengthens hybrid education by making the material accessible online.

- Contact person: Stephanie van den Berg

Eye Tracking is a powerful method for understanding human attention, visual processing, problem solving and preferences. It is useful in a variety of applied research domains, such as Human Factors, Communication Science, Marketing and Education. Eye tracking is expected to gain even more significance with the emerge of VR/AR systems in research and training.

BMS Lab is developing the GazeFlow system, which turns a regular webcam into a low-resolution eye tracking device. This budget-friendly system allows us to equip all our students with a working eye tracking system and has been piloted for teaching in two bachelor modules. Based on this and earlier experience, we will create a multi-disciplinary educational framework for eye tracking in BMS education, Etmerald (Eye Tracking Made Easy)

The goals of the project are:

• Developing a sequence of eye tracking learning units, spanning from first year bachelor to master level (CODE).
• Further develop GazeFlow, a budget-friendly eye tracking platform based on webcams (BMSLab).
• Create a Data Science workflow and an easy-to-use R package for eye tracking data (BDSI).
• Facilitate broad adoption of eye tracking within BMS education (PCRS, ETM, CS).

We will produce the necessary tools and create case studies, documentation, teacher guidelines, learning material for eye tracking on first year, second year and master level. The approach will be implemented and evaluated in three existing courses: B-Psy Module 3 (Cognition and Development), module Human factors & Engineering Psychology and M-Psy ARM (Advance Research Methods HFEP).

The goal long-term is to pave the way for integration of eye tracking in at least least three other BMS programs/themes. To keep an eye on the big picture, we include stakeholders from two other programs (CS and ETM) and one other psychology theme (PCRS). We will seek to get in contact with more potential adopters during the project.

- Contact person: Martin Schmettow