Welcome to THE Column on keeping you up-to-date on the changes in education. We will inform you in this column on the improvements made in education. We are selectively breeding the best forms of education for you!
In this column I, Lisa Kiel, the Commissioner Education, will inform you on all the relevant topics being discussed in the StudCie (Study Committee of Semper Florens) and the SPC (student program committee for the studies of plant sciences).
New program resit examinations
Currently the resits are held in the fifth and sixth week of the summer vacation. This is not the best time for a lot of students. Especially for the international students. They have to stay in the Netherlands for several weeks longer if they didn’t pass a course in one time. It is also irritating for our Dutch students, that have to learn in their well-deserved summer vacation. Also the lecturers have a difficult time with this, because they have to plan their vacations around the resits. This will change next year, when the summer resits will be held immediately after period 6. The Monday and Tuesday after period six you will be free to learn for your resits. From Wednesday onward you will have resits of period 1 through 5. The last two of days of the resits will be reserved for the examinations held in period six. This schedule may not work out well, because the lecturers would only get five days to check all the examinations held in the exam period of period six. After next year, the new schedule will be evaluated.
Bring Your Own Device
The university plans to remove all stationary computers and impart a ‘study everywhere, anytime’ policy. This means that everybody will have to bring their own laptop to the university from 2021 onward. There is also a plan to do a pilot in the first year of two studies. Which two studies are not known yet. One of the pilot years will get a laptop with little requirements (a cheaper laptop) and one pilot year will get a laptop with high requirements (a more expensive laptop). It is possible to buy one of two laptops from the university with a discount, but the prices the university is thinking about are very high (around 850 for the low requirements laptop and 1300 euros for the high requirements laptop). With the university recommended laptop you will also get a service packet, which means that you can get your broken laptop fixed in two weeks and you can borrow another laptop. The software needed for courses will be made available per period and not permanently, because that is too expensive. The university is also planning to make docking stations for the laptops in practical rooms and maybe other rooms. The plans for the computer exams are also not really clear yet, so we will have to wait on that.
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