The response confirmed that there is no shortage of ideas at Maastricht University (UM) for doing education differently. The selected projects cover degrowth economics, board games, wrongful convictions, bioinformatics and generative AI, among many others. Meet the educators behind the 12 projects and discover what they are developing.
Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML)
Jurica Bauer (FHML, CTR) is tackling one of the hardest problems in a genuinely unique programme. Regenerative Medicine and Technology is normally taught only at Master’s level elsewhere in the world; UM offers it at Bachelor’s level. That leaves a first-year course, Molecular Basis of Life, without any textbook that integrates chemistry and biology the way the programme actually needs them integrated. This project replaces the current monodisciplinary textbooks with eight weekly problem sets built around real regenerative medicine cases, plus a full open-access solutions manual, directly targeting a course that student evaluations already flag as one of the hardest in the curriculum.
Marvin Martens (FHML, Translational Genomics) is solving a problem of fragmentation rather than absence. Bioinformatics is already taught across FHML and the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE), in BLAST searches, cell signalling, database and metabolomics practicals reaching hundreds of students a year, but each practical lives in its own course, some behind closed access. This project harmonises them into a single openly licensed curriculum with a shared template and landing page, and registers the result as an ELIXIR Learning Path, giving Maastricht-built bioinformatics teaching visibility in a European training network built specifically for this kind of resource.
School of Business and Economics (SBE)
Clarence Bluntz (SBE, Maastricht Sustainability Institute) is writing a textbook that does not yet exist anywhere: one that brings together the political economy of growth and degrowth, the empirical tools of ecological economics, and the methods of systems dynamics, three bodies of knowledge social science students rarely encounter together. It will become the primary coursebookfor the Degrowth course at UCM and the Dynamics of Business course at SBE, replacing a fragmented set of journal articles and lecture slides with a single reference.
Irina Dolgopolova (SBE, MSCM) has spent years quietly collecting examples: more than 30 scenes from television shows and films that illustrate concepts like motivation, leadership and organisational culture. Her project, fittingly titled Netflix Meets Science, turns that collection into a structured workbook for Management of Organisations and Marketing, pairing each framework with a scene students already know from something like The Big Bang Theory. Students will be able to suggest their own examples too, so the resource keeps growing with each cohort.
Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE)
Sometimes the best way to lower a psychological barrier is to turn the subject into a game. Katharina Schneider (FSE, DACS) has already piloted a prototype of Calculus Legacy, a collaborative legacy-style board game, in the course Calculus, with results showing comparable academic performance to traditional tutorials and considerably more enthusiasm. This grant funds the professional production of the physical game and its release as an Open Educational Resource, with the ambition of eventually replacing the standard written assignments across four calculus courses.
Chang Sun (FSE, Advanced Computing Sciences) is building something for a course that has never run before: Responsible Generative AI, part of the brand-new MSc Responsible Data Science. Rather than teaching AI techniques first and appending ethics as an afterthought, her Responsible GenAI Lab pairs every technical module with a hands-on responsibility check. Students who build a text generator also run a reliability checker on its output; those working with image generation run a bias audit; those generating synthetic data compute its privacy risk. An environmental footprint calculator runs throughout, translating computing costs into tangible measures, such as litres of water and numbers of trees. The whole thing culminates in a personal Responsibility Report that doubles as each student’s own portfolio.
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS)
For Ferenc Laczo (FASoS), the starting point is five years of editing the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute, during which he interviewed leading historians on the major turning points of contemporary Europe. The grant will help him gather these scattered conversations, on subjects ranging from the end of the Cold War to the war in Ukraine, into a single reader with his own introductions. It is designed for a brand-new course, A History of the Present, and will give students a dialogical way into scholarly debate that a conventional textbook cannot offer.
Anna Harris (FASoS, Society Studies) is continuing a project that began with medicine’s ingenuity under pressure. Following the success of Clinical Tools #1: Education, her MaRbLe students will spend the coming year researching and co-writing Clinical Tools: A DIY Catalogue for the Creative, Issue 2: Pandemic, documenting the improvised inventions of the Covid years, from container hospitals to scuba-mask ventilators. Students will not just research the content; they will help design, edit and lay out the book itself, working alongside illustrators and a graphic designer to produce something with relevance well beyond Maastricht, in Skillslab courses and clinical training worldwide.
Faculty of Law (LAW)
At the LAW, Iveta Alexovicova is responding directly to student feedback. The current Cambridge University Press textbook for International Investment Law at University College Maastricht (UCM) proved too dense and legally technical for an undergraduate audience without legal training. Her Open Access alternative, 15 chapters each closing with a practical exercise, will replace it as the principal reading for the course and be made freely available to the much wider audience of policymakers, diplomats and civil servants who engage with this contested area of law without formal legal training.
A related but distinct gap is being addressed by Bram Rijsbosch and colleagues at the Law & Tech Lab (LAW). Their target audience is non-technical: law students in the Law & AI master specialisation who need to understand how generative AI actually works well enough to regulate it, not build it. The project pairs interactive lectures with sandboxed exercises where students can adjust the hidden settings that shape a chatbot’s answers, plus a guidebook for installing free, open-source LLMs locally, reducing dependence on major commercial providers. It is designed to expand well beyond its pilot course into other Law and UM programmes.
Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience (FPN)
At the FPN, Ophelia Zhang, together with Henry Otgaar and Yikang Zhang, is turning wrongful conviction cases into an active learning exercise for a brand-new Master’s course, Professional Practice in Legal Psychology. Rather than simply presenting cases as examples of what went wrong, the teaching package guides students through the same structured reasoning a legal psychologist needs: evaluating sources, separating established fact from interpretation, and reflecting on professional responsibility. The cases themselves are drawn from the Asian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, a Maastricht-coordinated initiative Zhang leads, which also brings underrepresented case contexts into legal psychology teaching.
Rudy Schreiber (FPN, Psychopharmacology) is filling a gap that his own former students keep telling him about after they graduate. Clinical Outcome Assessments, the measures used to prove whether a new psychiatric or neurodegenerative treatment actually works, are central to getting regulatory approval, yet entirely absent from the current Research Master curriculum. Drawing on his network as co-chair of the ECNP’s outcomes research group, he is co-creating case studies, decision-making exercises and a facilitator guide for a new course, Precision Neurotherapeutics, with several of the collaborators being current or former UM research master students themselves.
Supporting open education beyond OpenUP
Every colleague has the freedom to contextualise Open Science practices in the education they deliver, from a legacy board game to a bioinformatics curriculum built across six practicals. These 12 projects prove it, and we look forward to following each as they take shape over the coming year and sharing the results with you.
With 25 strong applications for 12 grants, a number of good ideas could not be funded this round. We are reaching out to those applicants directly to offer support and advice in developing their plans further, whether that means help finding alternative funding, connecting with a suitable publishing route, or simply working through the practicalities of opening up a set of teaching materials.
This is also a good moment to say why any of this matters. Materials developed openly do not stay confined to the course they were written for. A textbook released under an open licence can be picked up by a colleague down the corridor, an educator at another university, or a student teaching themselves years from now, something no closed reading list can offer. That is the idea behind Open Science in Education, and it is not limited to grant rounds. If you are curious what it could mean for your own teaching, or already have materials you would like to “open up”, including advice on licensing, the Open Science in Education team at the Maastricht University Library is here to help you think it through. Contact the team via the contact form below.
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