By: Hans Wanningen
Lonneke has supported RITHA since its creation in 2018. She played a part in the programme’s design as an educationalist – the beginning of a long-term commitment. Janneke, head teacher of workplace learning and lecturer in other RITHA blocks, shares the same passion for RITHA.
We want to provide the best possible education for our target audience: lifelong learning professionals with experience and prior knowledge who can contribute practical questions.
What educational vision lies at RITHA's foundations?
Lonneke: “We want to provide the best possible education for our target audience: lifelong learning professionals who bring their experience and prior knowledge and who contribute their daily practice questions. We do this by consistently putting these professionals and their practices centre stage: by making them responsible for their own learning in an activating environment where everyone learns with and from each other at all points in time. By ensuring that academia and practice constantly feed back and reinforce each other. Blended learning offers a wide array of resources and opportunities for this. All Radboud study programmes, including RITHA, are built on these pillars, as we call them.”
What attracts students to RITHA? And how does this help the gifted?
Janneke: “Making learners central and giving them control of their learning processes works for our varied teaching populations, from fields as diverse as care and education, and from a range of countries. However, our target groups – gifted children, young people and adults – would also benefit from this approach to education if they are to achieve excellence. They have room to make their own choices toward their
individual learning and development goals. We deliberately design our modules so we bring the aspects these target groups appreciate to the foreground.”
The study programme is completely blended. Why?
Lonneke: “The blended approach lends itself fantastically to activating, effective teaching. Take Brightspace, RITHA’s digital learning environment. With preparation assignments, in-depth articles, podcasts, quizzes, tests, video clips, discussion forums and so on. Learning, and thus teaching too, are made incredibly attractive. What students learn is ‘taken on’ better as well.”
Janneke: “Of course, with an international programme like RITHA, it makes sense to opt for blended learning anyway. The pandemic really pushed digital education too. Since teaching was only possible online for quite a while. The fact that RITHA is up to 80% online also brings the programme’s ultimate goal closer: mobilising talent all over the world.”
Lonneke: “There are more advantages to blended learning. In terms of didactics, for example, you can choose from so many modes of instruction and learning activities to work toward the learning outcomes we are aiming for. Blended education is like it’s made for self-direction and customisation. Each student can work out individual study routes according to their own insights and capabilities, and at their own pace. Blended learning facilitates and motivates students tremendously!”
Workplace learning is another one of RITHA’s assets. So is blended education actually helpful?
Janneke: “Of course! It means our learning professionals can use their new knowledge and skills much more flexibly and effectively in their jobs, how and when it suits them. Second, blended education facilitates supervision. Students, onsite facilitators and supervisors at the Radboud University can communicate digitally and asynchronously in all kinds of ways. Video calling on Zoom, posting recordings, you name it. Students can learn easier and do more online, in groups, from anyone’s workplace via webinars, discussion forums, subgroup meetings and so forth.”
Lonneke: “Online learning is anything but a solo activity. You have plenty of time to ask your questions, share the practices with others in your workplace, reflect on them and learn with and from each other.”
What makes workplace learning so prominent at RITHA?
Janneke: “It helps what we teach gain traction. A lot of our learning professionals are still doing pioneering work in their organisations. So it’s particularly beneficial and substantive to talk with like-minded people. Workplace learning helps bridge the gap between them and other pioneers. This way, they help each other grow as specialists; they work together to advance this important yet underexposed field of interest. Moreover, they work on a final product in the programme, which is intended for their work situation.”
Lonneke: “Profit for everyone involved. Pretty good, right? This is exactly what we want: that transfer from knowledge to practice, and vice versa.”
Of course, with an international programme like RITHA, it makes sense to opt for blended learning anyway. The pandemic really pushed digital education too.
In doing so, RITHA asks everyone to have an open learning attitude, with no exceptions?
Janneke: “That’s absolutely right! At the start of RITHA, you can see that there’s occasionally some uncertainty about the goals set. ‘Can I do this?’ ‘Am I being overambitious?’ ‘Is my organisation interested in this?’ You see them gradually grow in confidence. This is also because we teach our students that they don’t have to know everything immediately, that even specialists can be clueless sometimes. That, as a trainer, I learn a lot from them through the glimpses I get into their lives, through their practical questions and workplace learning. That making mistakes is permitted, part of the process and often very instructive. We came up with a new interactive work format for Brightspace a while back. It provided lecturers with a maelstrom of feedback requests from our ambitious students, which those equally passionate teachers immediately addressed in detail. Not the brightest idea, haha. But we learned from that too.”
Lonneke: “All of those things are ingrained in the programme’s design, in the culture of RITHA and RadboudCSW as a whole. That journey of discovery, from that open attitude. One step at a time and together with everyone around us. We try to convey a growth mindset. Also with asking our students: ‘What do you think about what we’re offering?’ ‘What could be better?’”
Then the break and conversation end. As a lecturer, Janneke dives straight into the next part of the start-up seminar. The new recruits are already eager to learn.
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