Saxion University of Applied Sciences
Saxion University of Applied Sciences is one of the largest institutions of higher education in the Netherlands, with 28,000 students. Saxion has three campuses in the East of the Netherlands - one campus in each of the three Dutch cities of Deventer, Enschede and Apeldoorn. The Saxion strategic profile ‘Living Technology’ is co-developed with the regional actors, confirmed in the themes and focus documented in the Smart Specialization Strategy Eastern Netherlands. Saxion practice oriented research puts the applicability of knowledge first, making the university act as a central hub between education, research, government and the business community. Our students are engaged as co-creators in partnership with companies and institutes. Saxion’s open and online initiatives are positioned in the university wide programme on Digital Education (in the Dutch context dubbed as ICT&O).
Initiative(s)
We are currently developing two open online courses, the first open course on Business Analytics and the second course on Smart Industries. Both courses are available under a CC-BY-NC license for other institutions or financial organisations. Our main focus of the courses is to teach students and professionals new skills in real-life cases which are all based on data and context of Dutch companies (e.g. Auping and KLM). As a University of Applied Sciences, applying the theory to practical scenarios is of high value within our institution. As new skills can only be learned with a proper understanding of the subject/task, we also examine OER to include in the courses for the theoretical underpinnings.
Within our institution we defined a policy on open access publications. The last couple of years the Saxion Library worked hard to translate the policy on open access to different practical working agreements. This resulted in a repository that support teachers and researchers to make their publications open access. For our effort on Open Acces, Saxion got the HBOAward (Award for HE-institutes in the Netherlands) for our contributions to Open Access last month.