2.1 Education facilitation
Redesign Education Regulations
The need to make education more flexible—including the promotion of interdisciplinary education—and the providing space for blended education and other forms of educational innovation are important developments that prompted the university to initiate a redesign of its education regulations in 2022. The various Education and Examination Regulations, Rules and Guidelines, and some related regulations are currently still based on the premise that, for students and academic staff, education is limited to their own programs or Schools, that education is physical, and that, therefore, the organization and regulations of that education has meaning only within the context of individual programs. As a result, the regulations also present a diverse picture of differences in structure, terminology, design, and content. With the redesign of the education regulations, Tilburg University is contributing to increasing collaboration between disciplines and Schools by setting up common models and making agreements on (joint) structural management and maintenance of the regulations, decision-making processes, and knowledge sharing. There is also a focus on untangling and unburdening, limiting the workload and reducing the perceived regulatory burden. The legal position of students is always taken as a starting point.
COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic forced universities to offer education online for nearly two years from 2020 to 2022. In early 2022, the government measures still had a major impact on university-administered exams. Students were required to remain quarantined if they had a roommate who was infected, preventing them from taking exams. This led the university to conditionally offer students an additional examination opportunity in April to avoid disproportionate study delays. Although students indicated in advance that they were eager to take advantage of this opportunity, ultimately, attendance was low as was the pass rate. At the same time, providing this extra opportunity caused a significant increase in the workload of lecturers.
With the elimination of government measures, the university has explicitly chosen to put on-campus education back at the center of its activities, starting from the 2022–2023 academic year and to use digitalization for blended learning with the aim of further improving the quality of education.
