Ellen Sjoer’s research while affiliated with The Hague University of Applied Sciences and other places

Acht perspectieven van de samenwerkende human capital lectoraten voor het realiseren van een doorbraak voor een toekomstbestendige arbeidsmarkt techyourfuture.nl LLO in 2030

Transformative curriculum innovation is needed in engineering education programmes, to continuously keep up to date with developments in the professional and research disciplines, in society, technology and pedagogy, and in the characteristics and needs of its diverse students. To enable and facilitate such innovations, both the curriculum's design and its institutional organisation need to be easily adaptable. This paper introduces Curriculum Agility, a concept that has been developed between 2018 and 2023 in a series of focus group sessions with engineering education practitioners and experts. Throughout these co-creational and iterative sessions, Curriculum Agility was defined as a responsively organised education, with dynamic learning contents and flexible pedagogics and didactics, while all involved staff is continuously developing competency to deal with the necessary transitions. Ten principles of Curriculum Agility are presented to guide curriculum innovators at programme and course level towards continuous transformation that is desirable, feasible, and viable within their context.

Organizational and societal transitions require workers to upskill and reskill their expertise within and across the boundaries of their current domain(s). This may also require them to materialize their renewed expertise in novel settings in interaction with stakeholders who hold different expectations regarding their know‐how and contributions. To stay employable, workers need to deal with shifting expertise needs by creating beneficial outcomes for themselves and their stakeholders, as captured by the so‐called flexpertise concept. Thus far, expertise research left largely unaddressed how workers adapt through intra‐individual changes over time and social interactions in naturalistic settings in which they encounter various new expertise needs. To increase our understanding of the dynamic nature of workers' adaptation processes, we conducted a Group Model Building study with HR/D practitioners. Through this structured group facilitation method, these practitioners cocreated a dynamic process model, based upon their varied experiences in practice regarding the flexpertise phenomenon. The newly developed model portrays how workers make balanced decisions to adapt, go through loops of learning‐by‐mistakes and ‐successes, and ultimately turn their new know‐how into outcomes, with or without impact, leading to new adaptation cycles. Furthermore, the practitioners defined leverage points where HR/D practices can stimulate individual adaptivity. This GMB study may set the agenda for future expertise and employability research and provides the foundation for designing bundles of HR/D practices to foster flexpertise.

In honours programmes, teachers face the task of designing courses in which students feel challenged and learn from accomplishing demanding assignments. The aim of this study was to investigate students' and teachers' perceptions of challenge and learning in an honours programme. From 2016 to 2019, students and teachers rated the learning activities during the programme and explained their ratings. The results showed that in the first two years, teachers estimated challenge and learning significantly higher than the students did. However, both students and teachers viewed the tasks as the factor with the strongest impact on challenge and learning. In the first year, students also identified group dynamics as challenging and a source for learning. Enhancing task complexity and supporting group dynamics are the main factors to adjust the level of challenge in an honours programme. Monitoring students' and teachers' perceptions can help to adapt the programme to improve students' learning.

In expertise research, the focus is shifting from how one becomes an expert in a specific field towards understanding how workers sustain the value and recognition of their expertise by being flexible. This so‐called flexpertise requires that workers meet new expertise needs within and across the boundaries of their current expertise domains and working contexts. The current study grounds a new theoretical paradigm regarding this individual adaptivity by introducing a ‘dynamic process model of flexpertise’. By deploying a system dynamics lens, it synthesizes the scholarly knowledge from different disciplines about flexible or adaptive forms of expertise. The model incorporates six categories of adaptation processes that involve intra‐individual changes and social interactions over time, and that are interconnected by means of feedback loops without a single start‐ or endpoint. This enables scholars and practitioners to identify leverage points where small interventions can have a large effect on the individual's adaptivity. As such, the dynamic model provides a new paradigm on how to foster workers’ continued possession of expertise that is valuable to organizations’ competitive advantage and enables organizational and societal transitions and innovations, while safeguarding an individual's career sustainability.

Waarom is samenwerking tussen bedrijven en onderwijsorganisaties van toenemend belang? En hoe kunnen we deze learning communities bouwen, beoordelen, betalen en borgen? De publicatie Een nieuw samenspel van innoveren, werken en leren? brengt kennis uit verschillende onderzoeken en handvatten uit de praktijk bij elkaar.

The energy management systems industry in the built environment is currently an important topic. Buildings use about 40% of the total global energy worldwide. Therefore, the energy management system’s sector is one of the most influential sectors to realize changes and transformation of energy use. New data science technologies used in building energy management systems might not only bring many technical challenges, but also they raise significant educational challenges for professionals who work in the field of energy management systems. Learning and educational issues are mainly due to the transformation of professional practices and networks, emerging technologies, and a big shift in how people work, communicate, and share their knowledge across the professional and academic sectors. In this study, we have investigated three different companies active in the building services sector to identify the main motivation and barriers to knowledge adoption, transfer, and exchange between different professionals in the energy management sector and explore the technologies that have been used in this field using the boundary-crossing framework. The results of our study show the importance of understanding professional learning networks in the building services sector. Additionally, the role of learning culture, incentive structure, and technologies behind the educational system of each organization are explained. Boundary-crossing helps to analyze the barriers and challenges in the educational setting and how new educational technologies can be embedded. Based on our results, future studies with a bigger sample and deeper analysis of technologies are needed to have a better understanding of current educational problems.