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In order to continue innovating and improving its education, Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ annually makes two million euros available each year for innovative projects that help to boost the development of academic education. One million euros of this is spent on small-scale, faculty-based projects. The other EUR 1 million is available for larger innovation projects in which two or more faculties work together.

The evaluation committee of the Utrecht Incentive Fund (USO) has selected six interfaculty projects focusing on inclusiveness, assessment quality, virtual reality, Sustainable Development Goals and research ethics.

Equality 2.0: developing a data-driven app to boost assessment quality

The goal of this project is to monitor the development of assessment quality in the long term, as well as to boost assessment quality using innovative data management solutions. It is a follow-up to the project (2017), in which a method was developed to improve and monitor assessment quality. Evaluations of this project show that another follow-up step was required (long-term monitoring of assessment quality) in order to continually monitor and sustainably safeguard assessment quality at UU. Project Leader: Harold Bok

Avatars of animals and humans: 3D interactive holographic models

In the proposed project 3D-holographic human and animal models (avatars) will be developed. The avatars can be studied in various stages of academic education, offering simulators in preparation for ‘real’ surgical interventions. With the avatars, the project leaders can study how effective the developed tools are in order to reach the learning goals. Additionally, the number of animals used for teaching and training will decrease. Project leader: Daniela Salvatori

Developing an inclusive curriculum and learning environment

Within this project, three faculties are working together to provide a course and curriculum scan for six diversity and inclusion programmes. The goal of this project is to create an overview of interventions designed to make the curriculum more inclusive. By means of an active-research method, a toolbox is being developed that can be used for other UU courses and curricula. Project Leader: Jeroen Janssen

Gaming for change

This project involves the development of a sustainability game for all year groups of all UU Bachelor's programmes based on the existing game Utrecht2040, which was developed by Geosciences. The game will focus on the Sustainable Development Goals (first year), interdisciplinarity and world view (second year) and sustainability in relation to the students' future professional field (third year). The purpose of the project is to create a broad and balanced sustainability game. Project Leader: Karin Rebel

Responsible Research Escape Room

The goal of this project is to develop an escape room in which Research Master's students are able to conduct game-based work in the field of academic integrity. It is an implementation project for the Educate-it Escape Room for lecturers. The project aims to make the escape room available to large groups of students simultaneously, to make it publicly available and to approach the issue from an interdisciplinary perspective. Project Leader: Mariëtte van den Hoven

Visualising Differences – Visual Dialogues on Diversity & Discourse (Vi-Di)

The goal of this project is to visually present the issues of diversity, differences and social exclusion. The intended deliverables are an offline film lab, an online video repository and a network of experts in making videos. Lecturers from three faculties will also personally participate in the creation of visualisations and the students will learn by approaching sensitive issues from a visual perspective as opposed to the usual text-based approach. The project therefore aims to create a visualisation-based teaching method. Project Leader: Brenda Oude Breuil

Utrecht incentivises educational innovation

The university established the Utrecht Incentive Fund (USO) in 2012 to enable lecturers to innovate their own teaching practice. This fund underlines the university's commitment to high-quality education and teaching. Every year, €1 million is available for interfaculty projects, each funded to a maximum of €250,000. These project proposals are assessed by a committee answering to the Board of the Centre for Academic Teaching (CAT). In addition to the interfaculty projects, the university also makes €1 million available for small-scale projects within individual faculties. The next call for proposals will be in June, meaning lecturers and lecturer teams will once again have the opportunity to submit new proposals at the end of 2020. Click here for more information about opportunities to submit a proposal or click to register for the CAT newsletter, which will keep you up to date with all developments. The provides access to the knowledge gained in recent years from USO projects.