3. Making an impact with our partners through education

Radboud University students joined forces with students from HAN University of Applied Sciences and ROC Nijmegen to take on a new City Deal project. City Deal Kennis Maken – a collaboration between the university, HAN and ROC – offers students the opportunity to conduct research into sustainability issues and work with students from various backgrounds and with local residents and professionals. This form of education is also a challenge for lecturers.

The new project involves the creation of a ‘harvest route’ in the Meijhorst district of Nijmegen, along which people can pick fruit, nuts and flowers free of charge. Several Master’s students from the university (science faculty) conducted a biodiversity study as part of the Reaching the Sustainable Development Goals elective. Together with their fellow students from HAN and Yuverta, they drafted a report with recommendations for the neighbourhood residents.

A new City Deal project on the circular economy was also launched this year. Furthermore, in 2021 the three educational institutions and the municipality expressed the ambition – after four years of running the City Deal programme – to integrate it more effectively into the various educational programmes.

In the autumn, Nijmegen and Glasgow strengthened their partnership by signing off on six dual degrees that have been jointly developed over the past two years. This gives substance to the Memorandum of Understanding (from 2018), which includes a collaboration fund to stimulate staff to develop joint innovative programmes.

The six programmes will offer students from both institutions the opportunity to gain international and intercultural experience. The six themes are: International Business, Economic Development & Social Change, Comparative Politics, Political Communication & Comparative Politics, Global Political Economy and Artificial Intelligence & Digital Society. Tom Elfring, Dean of Nijmegen School of Management: “We hope these six programmes will inspire further forms of collaboration.”

Pinpointing the position of a rocket live, to within a few centimetres, throughout its flight: that is what a team of researchers and students from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Radboud University will test during an experimental rocket launch in Sweden in March 2023. Their method – which is up to ten times more accurate than GPS – may allow better guidance of rockets to bring them down in the right place. They will also measure the arrival direction of cosmic rays.

The Eindhoven and Nijmegen team’s experiment, called PR4 Space, is one of the projects selected to participate in the European programme REXUS, an initiative of the Swedish, German and European (SNSA, DLR, ESA) space agencies. This project launches two rockets a year, each carrying four to five experiments by student teams from different countries.

OnePlanet Research Centre is the partnership established in 2019 between Radboud University, Radboud university medical center, Wageningen Research & Impact and Imec (an R&D hub for chip and digital technology). In addition to high-profile innovations – such as a swallowable pill that signals abnormalities in the gastrointestinal tract – the centre includes an education programme focused on social issues in the province of Gelderland. As part of this OnePlanet Open Education programme, the university works with provincial institutes for higher professional education (HBO) and senior secondary vocational education (MBO).

In 2021, students from the university and the HBO collaborated with the Fruittech Campus in Geldermalsen (an initiative of several regional training centres) on a project about more sustainable cultivation and a better way of determining fruit quality. Earlier, student teams had focused on giving better support and guidance to Parkinson’s patients and children with obesity. 260 students have played active roles in Open Education to date.

Students and lecturers expressed their appreciation for the programmes in the evaluations. An Industrial Product Design student from HAN: “The collaboration with students from other study programmes was sometimes difficult in practical terms, but it was also inspiring to be introduced to totally different views and methods, so it was very informative.” Angelique Brinkman, Social Work lecturer at ROC RijnIJssel (Arnhem), called the collaboration with students from the university and HBO a huge asset to her study programme. “Our students gain self-confidence that our practical knowledge and skills are of added value in the project.”

Thea van Kemenade, Director of Health on the OnePlanet management team, called Open Education an example of the university’s added social value: “Because it allows us to share our knowledge with other educational institutions and regional partners. In this way, we not only promote cohesion between educational institutions, but we also strengthen the relationship between education and the job market.”