How the CLI creates connections between faculties and central services

One of the five pillars of EUR's quality assurance vision is "One Connected EUR": EUR actively promotes and facilitates connections between faculties. This pillar is at the heart of how the Community for Learning & Innovation (CLI) operates. A conversation with Mirjam van de Woerdt (CLI manager) about connection, community thinking, and balancing central and decentralized responsibilities in educational innovation.

What is the CLI's core mission?

'We've always focused on future-oriented education,' says Mirjam. 'That's really our scope. We work across different areas and levels to improve and innovate education at EUR.'

The CLI has three main components: innovation and digitization projects, faculty development, and educational research. 'Within these areas, we tackle themes that directly contribute to implementing EUR's strategy,' Mirjam explains. 'Think impact-driven education, AI integration in teaching, as well as accessibility, agility, and sustainability.'

What makes the CLI's approach distinctive is their foundational philosophy: 'We deliberately use a community approach to develop solutions together with the faculties. We're supportive, inspiring, and driving change, but never imposing it. We operate within a decentralized university structure, so we want to work through connection and collaboration wherever possible.'

How is the CLI organized and how do you work with the learning innovators in the faculties?

The CLI has a core team of 17 people: project managers, several learning innovators, communications staff, and a project management office. 'We also deliberately partner with research institute RISBO,' Mirjam explains. 'This gives us flexibility in deploying educational specialists.'

Different models exist for organizing educational innovation. 'Some universities choose to centralize everything in-house with teams of 60 people. Others take the opposite approach—no central presence, everything positioned at faculty level. At EUR, we've chosen a hybrid model where we drive and connect centrally through the CLI, while faculties maintain their own specialized expertise.'

The learning innovators in the faculties aren't funded by the CLI—they're paid by their faculties. 'What's interesting is that they actively participate in our community out of intrinsic motivation and because they see real value in collaboration. They recognize it strengthens their own work.'

How does collaboration with faculties work in practice?

'Our main contacts in the faculties are the learning & innovation colleagues,' Mirjam explains. 'All faculties invest in learning & innovation to some degree. At mid-sized faculties, this might be one person wearing multiple hats—quality officer, policy officer, or lecturer. Larger faculties sometimes have entire learning & innovation teams.'

These contacts serve as the crucial bridge between the CLI and faculties. 'They share their needs and priorities with us, and we support them in strengthening, connecting, and professionalizing education.'

To facilitate these connections, the CLI has established various consultation structures. 'We hold monthly meetings bringing faculty learning innovators together. They program the meetings themselves on a rotating basis.'

How do you balance central support with faculty autonomy?

'We take a genuinely positive approach,' Mirjam responds. 'We believe you ultimately make more progress by inspiring people with good examples. The alternative would be issuing warnings or pointing out consequences for non-compliance, but we don't believe in that approach.'

The CLI therefore intentionally highlights positive examples—fellowship research, innovation projects, success stories. 'We were thrilled, for example, when Peter Marks and Pieter Tuytens took the stage at the beginning of the academic year after winning the teaching award with a CLI project. That's exactly the kind of inspiration we want to create.'

This approach isn't always straightforward. 'We're realistic too. There are limits to how far this takes you in some cases, but we see it as the only right path. Sometimes you have to accept that your ambitions exceed what faculties can achieve, or that they set different priorities.'

What happens when a faculty chooses a different direction?

'Our approach is to accept the situation as it is but still try to drive change through other means—different levels, different examples,' Mirjam explains.

She offers a concrete example: 'At one faculty, I was working on developing an online version of a master's program alongside the campus version. That development couldn't move forward because there was significant resistance from staff. We said: "Understood, we'll focus our efforts on developments at other faculties." Eventually, you hope people will come back: "You've achieved great things elsewhere—can we talk again?"'

Mirjam calls this "creating appetite": 'It's always about balance—you're not directly responsible for education, but you can get people thinking and maybe make them a bit 'hungry' for change. Sometimes you see faculties that initially couldn't or wouldn't participate eventually joining in after some time.'

How is knowledge shared between faculties?

Beyond monthly meetings with learning innovators, the CLI facilitates knowledge sharing through other channels. 'We run Communities of Practice around multiple themes,' Mirjam explains. 'Take our "Game Based Learning Community"—we send open invitations to all faculties and teams: "Interested in this? Are you developing something yourself? Have examples or specific questions? Join us!"'

These Communities of Practice are ongoing development sessions where participants build relationships. 'We ask people to commit to meeting 3-4 times over a full year and stay active in our Teams environment between meetings. We program and support the community but always seek an academic lead who contributes content expertise.'

The CLI also offers practical training through Microlabs. 'These are brief training sessions specifically tailored to fit lecturers' schedules,' Mirjam explains. 'They're designed to provide hands-on tools you can implement in your teaching immediately.'

The CLI also has a physical meeting space, the Education Lab. What role does it play?

'The Education Lab is located in the Polak building—it's a meeting and design space for all faculties,' Mirjam explains. 'It's where faculties can go when they're working on educational innovation, improvement, or quality enhancement.'

The lab includes a studio for recording videos and podcasts, in partnership with the Media Support Center. 'The idea is that lecturers, colleagues, or students who come just for recordings can also see other activities happening—redesign sessions, brainstorming meetings, inspiration sessions. This way we connect with more people and build community.'

What are you most proud of when you look at everything the CLI has built in recent years?

'I'm most proud that the learning & innovation teams in the faculties and we at CLI see each other as mutual reinforcement, not competition,' Mirjam responds. 'That wasn't a given in 2017 when we started. In such a decentralized organization, the question was: do we even want this at the central level? I'm proud we've made this hybrid approach work—you don't have to choose between faculty-level or central-level everything. And we've really introduced community thinking within EUR.'

What's been the key success factor?

'Our connecting approach,' Mirjam says decisively. 'Not imposing our own ambitions but primarily adding value from a supportive stance. That doesn't mean being reactive or passive—it means sometimes adjusting your pace and ambitions.'

What does the future hold for CLI-faculty collaboration?

'What I've seen as a real improvement lately is that we're collaborating more intensively with central quality assurance, and connections are emerging at faculty level between learning & innovation and quality assurance staff,' Mirjam explains. 'I think we'd gain a lot if we could use insights from quality assurance—feedback from accreditations, for example—to proactively engage faculties about improvement opportunities and even innovation possibilities.'

Mirjam strongly believes in incremental change: 'I believe small improvements and innovations can snowball into something much bigger. I don't think everything needs to be radically different or disruptive. I believe that if we help a lecturer in small ways, that lecturer becomes increasingly likely to reach out more often.'