The acceleration plan, aimed to help digitalise our education, is finishing off this year. What’s next? In this episode of EduTalks we talk to Prof. Dr. Kim Schildkamp to find out.
Kim Schildkamp chairs the teacher professionalization zone of the acceleration plan. The acceleration plan started in 2019 to help every lecturer and institution in a much-needed digitalisation sprint.
‘One of our big goals was to connect to all 50.000 lecturers that we have at universities (of applied sciences) in the Netherlands. Not only the early adopters. The early adopters might look behind over their shoulder at some point and see that no one is following them. Interestingly, one thing that helped us with this goal was the pandemic.’
You can listen to the episode directly on Soundcloud or Spotify.
Through different products, publications, and projects the zones facilitate educational institutes and organisations to professionalise themselves in digitalising their education. When Schildkamp started as chairperson, she was not that familiar with ICT in education but learned fast about how ICT can facilitate educational innovation.
‘We decided that ICT is not the goal. The goal is improving education, so our focus is: how do we improve education with the means of educational innovation with ICT? That led to several concrete ideas and products, like an evidence-informed blended learning toolkit that will be published soon.’
The acceleration plan is coming to an end, but a sequel is already in works on an even larger scale: the national growth fund has greenlit the Digitalisation Impulse. This plan will continue where the acceleration plan has left off, together with starting other initiatives.
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