Why academic skills?
The first years of the bachelor focus on acquiring knowledge. In the plenary lectures students are introduced to new concepts, which they then apply in the tutorials. The purpose of this is to give students as much knowledge and insight as possible. This requires a crucial second step: processing knowledge. After all, knowledge is only valuable if it can be applied in different situations. Academic skills also improve one’s ability to spread knowledge. This aspect is present throughout the bachelor curriculum, for instance in the seminars in the third year.
Students thus get the opportunity to train the following skills:
- Acquiring knowledge
- Processing knowledge
- Spreading knowledge
In addition to acquiring and processing knowledge, spreading knowledge plays a major role in the bachelor. During the bachelor, students are increasingly challenged to spread knowledge they have gained. The skills programme stimulates and supports this process.
Besides aiming to improve the acquisition and processing of knowledge, some bachelor courses especially focus on the spreading of knowledge. These courses are Marketing (Bachelor 1), Organisation & Strategy (Bachelor 1) and History of Economic Thought (Bachelor 2). In these cases, students follow separate skills tutorials, in addition to the regular lectures and tutorials. By directly applying skills to a course, students experience what it means to spread knowledge of a particular subject. The skills tutorials have small sizes, in order to stimulate student participation.
For skills development, it is important that the skills have an academic quality. This means that students can learn certain rules on how to gather, process and spread knowledge in an academically sound way. For example, students receive specific guidelines on writing academic papers, using academic research methods, referencing and critically reviewing literature.
The IBEB programme lets students develop a variety of skills:
- Listening (aim: gathering and processing knowledge), throughout the bachelor.
- Discussing (aim: processing and (critically) spreading knowledge), in particular in the Marketing course and the seminars.
- Gathering data (aim: gathering knowledge), throughout the bachelor.
- Processing data (aim: processing knowledge), in particular in the courses ICT, Applied Statistics 1 & 2 and Methods & Techniques.
- Writing (aim: processing and spreading knowledge), in particular in the skills tutorials of Organisation & Strategy and History of Economic Thought. The Research Project and the Bachelor Thesis focus on this as well.
- Presenting and communicating (aim: processing and spreading knowledge), in particular in the skills tutorials for Marketing. The elective Communication Skills focus on this as well.
The following diagram shows the various skills and the relevant courses:
Throughout the bachelor, students revisit these academic skills on multiple occasions. The main focal point of the skills programme lies in the spreading of knowledge.
