Comenius programme

€50.000, one-year project, small-scale innovation (e.g., course level). You are at the beginning of your career with at least two years of teaching experience in higher education (see application procedure for more information).

€100.000, two-year project, innovation in a complete degree programme. You have at least five years of teaching experience in higher education. A maximum of one candidate per faculty can submit (see application procedure for more information).

€500.000, three-year project, innovation in one or more faculties or a complete institution. You have at least seven years of teaching experience, educational leadership skills and a track record of contributing to the educational climate of your higher education institution. A maximum of one candidate per institution can submit (see application procedure for more information).

Projects within this theme focus on how new forms of education can be successfully developed and implemented in higher education to benefit students. Examples include student-driven education, learning communities, challenge-based learning or technological innovations.

A key question is how different student groups can be better helped to successfully navigate their way into and through higher education. This may involve looking at, for example, diversity in social-economic, cultural and ethnical background, religious beliefs, or functional disability, but also in education sector, by improving the connection between secondary and higher education.

Colleges and universities aim to prepare students well for their career development. The labour market is changing rapidly, with shifts in supply and demand, so it remains a challenge for higher education to stay connected to the professional field in the future.

Within the open theme, it is possible to choose from a wide range of topics. These are projects that contribute to the innovation and improvement of higher education for the benefit of students.

Projects within this theme focus on topics that arise from the teacher's curiosity in education design.

Precise guidelines for this application are published in the Calls for Proposals. If you are interested, please contact your faculty funding officer for internal deadlines and procedures.

• Letter of intent (deadline): 9 September 2025, 14:00 CEST

• Preliminary application (deadline): 7 October 2025, 14:00 CEST

• Full application (deadline): 20 January 2026, 14:00 CEST

• The decision by the assessment committee: end May 2026

Precise guidelines for this application are published in the Call for Proposals.

For the Senior Fellow grant: Only one Senior Fellowship can be nominated per faculty. Most faculties, therefore, organize an internal selection procedure. If you are interested, please contact your dean and faculty funding officer for internal deadlines and procedures.

• Letter of intent (deadline): 2 September 2025, 14:00 CEST

• Preliminary application (deadline): 23 September 2025, 14:00 CEST

• Full application (deadline): 13 January 2026, 14:00 CEST

• Rebuttal based on preliminary advise:

• The decision by the assessment committee: end May 2026

Precise guidelines for this application are published in the Call for Proposals.

For the Leadership Fellows grant: only one Leadership Fellowship can be nominated per institution. Therefore the UG organizes an internal selection procedure in which Deans are asked to submit names of possible candidates at the beginning of each calendar year. If you are interested, please contact your dean and faculty funding officer for internal deadlines.

• Letter of intent (deadline): 4 September 2025, 14:00 CEST

• Full application (deadline): 30 October 2025, 14:00 CEST

• Rebuttal based on preliminary advise: January 2026

• Interviews: Mid April 2026

• The decision by the assessment committee: May 2026

More information

More information regarding the grants can be found in the Comenius brochure and by consulting the FAQ on the NRO website.

Tips for writing a proposal

NRO has created short videos with tips on how to write a Comenius proposal, which you can view on this website. For questions, please contact our talent and grant coordinator, dr. Maaike Engels, via m.c.engels rug.nl.

The teacher shortage is a complex social problem. In secondary education, many science subjects are shortage subjects: too few university students choose careers as teachers of mathematics, chemistry, physics or computer science. One possible explanation for this is the low esteem in which the teaching profession is held. The social status of first-grade teachers in particular is relatively low: they are no longer seen as a highly educated professional. In international comparisons, a high status of being a teacher appears to be correlated with teaching quality. Raising teacher esteem thus benefits both reducing the teacher shortage and the quality of our education of the future. In this application, we focus on increasing the appreciation of teaching for both students and teachers at the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE). During a newly developed course, open to students on all FSE undergraduate courses, students will be introduced to learning and teaching theories, STEM didactics, and their specific application in faculty teaching. They actively contribute to educational improvement by working within a small-scale project together with teacher-participants on an educational innovation in their own undergraduate programme. Through this experience of evidence-informed development of teaching activities, students and their lecturers gain a better understanding, enthusiasm and appreciation for the teaching profession. These positive teaching experiences contribute to educational improvement at the faculty, and may lead to increased intake into teacher education.

Computing Science (CS) students often need to navigate and integrate many educational resources during a course. While Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT enable students to query information using natural language, it unfortunately ignores the knowledge curated in the course material, and often results in inaccurate answers. Our proposal addresses this challenge with the responsibility CS students will have as future developers of AI-enabled technology.

For that, we revise the Advanced Programming course at the University of Groningen to expose students to the development cycle of modern AI-enabled systems. The revision centers around the creation of an AI-powered learning assistant using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to improve the accuracy and relevance of responses to course-specific queries. By integrating course materials like lecture notes and textbooks with the power of LLMs, the system aims to overcome limitations of general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT.

Students will develop the system’s user interface, while the Digital Lab, a dedicated software engineering team, handles the RAG component. This collaboration offers students hands-on experience in software development under realistic conditions, and provides exposure to ethical considerations, compliance with the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, and practical knowledge in testing and deploying AI systems.

This project will benefit multiple course editions, as the system will be continuously improved, and the open-sourced software will allow for broader adoption across other institutions. By engaging with this project, students will acquire valuable skills in AI development and practical software engineering, becoming both contributors to and beneficiaries of a transformative educational tool.

This project realises interdisciplinary teaching modules that teach students to spot serendipitous connections within algorithmically-generated media, and thereby foster their serendipity mindset. Innovations often spring from serendipitous, seemingly coincidental insights. However, these insights require a “prepared mind”. This prepared mind can be trained as a set of skills or mindset, and is increasingly important in a digital world of predictive algorithms and Large Language Models (LLMs) trained to mimic human reasoning. These technologies generate new texts based on statistical predication of patterns, instead of highlighting anomalies.

Training a serendipity mindset empowers students to understand that both patterns and anomalies are opportunities to recognize serendipity. Humanities students embrace LLMs in education, but also report avoidance due to a fear of over-reliance and a lack of trustworthiness. Students need to increase algorithmic and information literacy and critical evaluation skills. In this project, students work within the interdisciplinary Digital Creativity and Serendipity Lab to learn:

(1) to investigate how digital technologies such as search engines, scraping tools, generative AI, and interfaces shape serendipitous insights, and
(2) how a skilled serendipity mindset supports their development as critical, innovation-savvy scholars and professionals.

This project offers students transferable technical, social and creative competencies to develop and hone their serendipity mindset. Deliverables include openly accessible Serendipity and Education teaching modules and materials, including a teaching for serendipity course guide, and a hybrid “Serendipity in Education” workshop for fellow teachers.

Troubleshooting is a key skill for any biomedical researcher, yet it is difficult to teach in traditional practicals due to practical constraints, the “cookbook” approach - where students follow protocols without critical thinking - and the pairwise course design, which limits individual opportunities for troubleshooting. Mistakes can be valuable learning tools when paired with feedback, but practical education often lacks space for repeated trials to learn from. This project aims to enhance the troubleshooting skills of biomedical students during laboratory experiments through the use of an AI chatbot.

We will use AI chatbots in our BSc Biology Biomedical Research Laboratory Course. These chatbots simulates failed lab experiments by acting as a virtual lab technician who made an error, prompting students to diagnose problems and provide solutions. Students will use these chatbots in preparation for their lab days to practice troubleshooting. In an informal pilot, this innovation already showed positive student engagement and perceived improvement in troubleshooting.

In this project, we will expand and improve the chatbots and assess its impact on students' troubleshooting skills. This will be measured through students’ perceived effects using a mixed methods approach and by developing tests to measure students’ troubleshooting skills directly. While this study will establish best practices for our course, our findings and innovation can directly be applied to other laboratory courses within and outside of our university. We hope to demonstrate AI’s potential to address educational challenges and shape the future of learning.

Law studies have traditionally focused on interpreting texts (laws, case law and legal articles) and learning to set up legal reasoning based on them. Although law attempts to regulate people's behaviour, the perspective of people is absent during the study. The Childcare benefits scandal has made it painfully clear that lawyers and judges should have been more aware of the personal impact of their decisions on those involved. Those involved recognise this themselves. The Childcare benefits scandal has not only caused great damage to those directly involved, but has also shaken confidence in the rule of law. Lawyers should therefore pay more attention to the perspective of the people who come into contact with the law (hereinafter: litigants).

The aim of this proposal is to impress upon law students during their education that empathy is a core quality of a good lawyer and to develop their empathy skills in a measurable way. Ultimately, lawyers must strike a balance between empathy for litigants' emotions on the one hand and professional distance on the other. Currently, these skills are lacking in university legal education in the Netherlands, causing graduates to miss this essential competence in practice.

This project integrates empathy into the legal curriculum, which until now has mainly been done outside law schools. The interventions chosen were inspired by teaching empathy to medical students. In doing so, connection was sought with empirical research on empathy education in the United States. This project is a pilot and the intention is to eventually (after evaluation) set up a teaching line on empathy skills.

Circular development has emerged as a transformative approach to sustainability, moving beyond traditional practices like recycling and remanufacturing. It now places a strong emphasis on developing and sharing the critical knowledge, values, and skills needed to build sustainable futures. Despite the Netherlands' position as a global leader in circularity, the 2024 Dutch Circularity Gap Report underscores an urgent need to strengthen human capital to address pressing socio-spatial challenges in housing, infrastructure, mobility, and public services. With the growing demand for sustainable spatial development and the corresponding need for green talent in spatial planning and design, it is imperative for higher education to prioritize preparing the next generation of professionals with the expertise and vision necessary to lead this vital transformation.

Applied learning is a cornerstone of Spatial Planning and Design (SPD) education, enabling students to develop robust, practice-oriented portfolios. The NextGenCircular project introduces a forward-thinking approach by combining professional-to-student mentorship with challenge-based learning. This creates a laboratory where students not only engage with the concept of circularity through leading Dutch practices but also apply their knowledge in practical, hands-on contexts. In the short term, students will gain a deeper understanding of circular development, translating theory into actionable solutions. In the long term, students will enhance their professional profiles, open doors to opportunities in the green labor market, and empower themselves to become next generation circular leaders capable of bridging the circularity gap.

more information will follow shortly..

Technological developments, both in digital technologies and (generative) artificial intelligence (AI), are having a significant impact on society. Lawyers are confronted with these technologies and the far-reaching changes they bring about in society. Critically assessing the possibilities, limitations and risks of new digital technologies is therefore becoming an essential part of their work. In addition to legal knowledge, this requires skills in evaluating the promises and effects of technologies and collaborating with professionals from other disciplines. Examples of issues include the use of cameras and sensors in public spaces, the use of drones to bring medicine to hard-to-reach places, or issues around autonomous systems: in what ways can they have a positive impact on people's mobility or smarter logistics?

Current curricula do not adequately prepare law students to legally analyse these issues. The simulation labs we want to implement in the RUG law school therefore focus on allowing students to experience their roles as legal professionals vis-à-vis new technologies. They develop judgement on the impact of new technologies on privacy, equality, transparency and human autonomy and thus learn to place technology in a legal and social context. The end goal of these simulation labs is for future lawyers to become more confident and skilled in discussing and dealing with digital technologies, both with peers and professionals from other disciplines. Moreover, students in the labs will work on developing an identity as a lawyer.

This project aims at creating open educational resources (OERs) for university teachers involved in STEM courses. The final product is a combination of new and existing technologies consisting of the following components: A) a library of interactive knowledge clips, B) an adaptive question generator providing students with a personalized learning experience, and C) an analytics tool for monitoring student performance and giving early warning signs. These tools are to be used and tested in courses on Calculus which is one of the most common university courses offered in STEM programmes.

Students in English-language creative writing courses often avoid employing heritage languages in their work because they are afraid of how readers will respond. However, the ability to share one’s linguistic identity without fear of discrimination is an essential right of multilingual student authors that promotes feelings of belonging. We therefore seek to introduce an innovative approach to teaching creative writing that foregrounds multilingualism, starting with an English-language poetry-writing course. Students will strengthen their translanguaging skills and experience decreased anxiety about multilingual writing. An online toolkit and a national workshop for creative writing lecturers will facilitate widespread application of the innovation.

Revolutionizing BSc practicums, our project aims to empower students by allowing them to plan and design their experiments in a biochemistry practicum. Current evaluations highlight issues like exhaustion and low motivation in traditional practicums due to the lack of student agency. To overcome this, we plan to implement a modular platform of different laboratory methods enabling flexible individual experiment design in large cohort practicum courses. Anticipating a transformative shift, we believe this initiative will address current shortcomings, impart crucial planning skills, and align practicum experiences with students' career aspirations to becoming an independent researcher, fostering engagement and motivation.

Identifying with course content requires students to feel engaged and represented. Traditional science curricula are too often not inclusive enough, discouraging students from contributing their diverse backgrounds to their learning environment. In this project, we create portraits of underrepresented chemists and combine them with diversified chemistry escape games in the context of a basic chemistry course. Inclusivity and learning are thus tackled synergistically, providing students a safe and playful environment to deepen their chemistry knowledge and identify with role models, while learning to work together and appreciate contributions from chemists of different (often neglected) backgrounds.

Computer simulation techniques have improved the way we do and teach engineering in the last decades. These tools have however a drawback: the visualization of a 3D world in 2D screens. Many students have faced this problem, trying to understand the complex physics at the same time they tried to elucidate what was displayed in the blackboards. This leads to a passive learning process and an increase in drop-out rates. Our proposal aims at tackling this problem by means of VR tools, which will ease the visualization and learning process as well as create an active learning environment.

Data science proficiency is a vital skill in industry and academia. State-of-the-art data analysis requires coding, which has a steep learning curve for many students. We will implement a platform to which students in the biostatistics 1 and 2 courses can submit solution scripts. Upon submission, the platform will provide immediate automated individual feedback to the student. This will allow students to improve their analysis through multiple rounds of feedback, independent of teacher availability. Furthermore, it will allow teachers to adjust the course in real time based on an analysis of the submitted scripts and associated feedback.

Access to education, as a precondition for a diverse student body, ensures equity and talent utilization. About 30% of the students experience obstacle(s), may it be spaces, materials, group processes, or the academic culture. Learning communities (LCs) allow to provide accessible and inclusive learning experiences. To enable all students can make the most of the benefits of LCs and to increase access to ‘Academic Skills’, the obstacles need to be understood and reduced, using students’ input and evidence-based approaches. This project offers tools to reduce obstacles and to enable educators to manage diversity, increase accessibility and inclusiveness.

With this project, we stimulate students’ insight into their learning development and their self-confidence through progress testing at the programme level. We expect to increase student retention of knowledge and skills. Student can view their progress in comparison to programme learning outcomes, their previous results and their peers’ results on an informative dashboard. A second dashboard provides insight into the progress of specific student groups for educational managers and educators. We will share our experiences and the developing process with other educational institutions through open-access output.

Exercise is important for a healthy lifestyle, but this is not easy for everyone. Healthy exercise may be a challenge for the elderly, but also for athletes who exercise a lot. In the Netherlands, physicians and human movement scientists have the expertise but there is no common approach or education in applied exercise physiology. In this Comenius project, we will develop an academic program for students, teachers and professionals in multiple disciplines to learn together about healthy exercise in two subsequent learning communities. This creates a better connection between education and the professional field for the application of Exercise=Medicine.

Many students attend university to study STEM fields, but may not be able to afford tuition and boarding without having a job at the same time. Given the recent increases in undergraduate students enrolling in those studies, which often have large introductory courses that lack the physical space to accommodate them during lectures and tutorials, universities need to reconsider how those courses are organized; one solution is hybrid education. Our project proposes the development of a framework, based on research of effective teaching practices, that instructors can use to adapt existing curricula for hybrid instruction.

As a language student, you probably recognize this problem: you want to major in French but most of the courses in your language program are offered in English. Yet, you are supposed to reach a high level in French during your bachelor's degree. This project aims to help you by offering a multilingual course in which you learn to understand each other's languages and cultural points of view, while you continue to develop the French language through strategies such as language comparison, interpretation and mutual understanding. A premiere in a university!

Complex spatial problems in urban areas require the integration of knowledge from different perspectives to make informed urban design decisions. In this project, we develop a teaching module including a Geospatialreality toolset, that enables the use of spatial data for designing an urban area informed by quantitative measurements of spatial features and subjective experiences in a Virtual Reality environment. The toolset will be interactive and dynamic: changes in the design will affect the quantitative measurements and the experience in VR. The module will learn how to create a design with iterative and collaborative methods, enabling a transdisciplinary approach.

Blended-learning tools are not automatically sufficient for the students’ study success. Educational design that facilitates community building and collaboration between students is vital. We have developed a comprehensive strategy, encouraging community building and collaboration between students, aiming to humanize the online/hybrid courses, through building of trust, presence, awareness and empathy. Easy to follow step-by-step guidelines for teachers will be produced, including a project website, instructions, and instructional videos on humanizing (online/hybrid) courses and using the WeBWork Open-Source platform for assignments. Students will be involved as co-creators and testers, gaining unique programming, communication, and management experience.

Student diversity is the norm rather than the exception in teaching nowadays. Diversity should bring value to the learning process of all students. However, research indicates that it requires careful planning of lecturers to develop diversity into a valuable asset in the learning process of students. If poorly managed, diversity may result in tensions and reinforcement of prejudices among students. To make value of diversity, lecturers need both technological and pedagogical training and support. This project offers technological support for, a.o., inclusive group work through educational logistics, while pedagogical support is offered through inclusiveness training.

The project is dedicated to “Pixascope”, a software package for students and researchers to analyze large-scale visual datasets, like those that can be collected from social media platforms. Currently, much of the research on large datasets focus on text, rather than images. This project hopes to give students the tools to use cutting-edge technology to analyze visual culture and enhance teaching and learning in RUG’s MA track in Social Media & Society. While visual platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are growing in prominence, education still prioritizes text. Pixascope hopes to change that by providing a new set of tools and an educational programme alongside them.

The project focuses on exploring how all students regardless of gender could be encouraged to explore their talents to their full potential in the domain of mathematics. Aim of the project is to show that a course like Calculus can be gender inclusive with a number of small changes. Till now a lot of efforts were put by different organizations to increase the enrollment of girls into STEM study programs, however, research universities are still behind to take measures to retain female students.

Many pre-service teachers feel they are insufficiently prepared to effectively manage disruptive behaviors, especially when learning is situated in a dynamic setting such as a kindergarten. Moreover, they find it challenging to translate scientific theories on classroom management into everyday kindergarten teaching practices. Therefore, the main aim of our project "Keeping order in a Virtual Kindergarten Classroom" is to develop and evaluate an innovative and interactive Virtual-Reality kindergarten environment in which students of the Academic Teacher Training Program (AOLB) can safely experiment with different classroom management strategies.

Within universities, much research is conducted and there is a big focus on how to do research. Since the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, in Dutch: AVG), guarding the privacy of stakeholders has become a top priority. This project aims to teach students how to ask the right questions about privacy by helping them look at privacy issues from various perspectives (researcher, subject, legal expert, IT expert, etc.). Furthermore, it will develop an approach for successfully designing, implementing, and embedding responsible research methodology in interdisciplinary research. The project provides material and know-how for the next generation of researchers.

The University of Groningen is developing an app based on insights from argumentation theory and deliberation theory that helps students conduct a deliberative debate. Information gathering, consultation, and the exchange of arguments are central to this. The app also allows students to experiment with self-designed discussion formats. The aim is to create widely applicable education modules, first for bachelor's and master's students, and then for students in secondary, secondary, and higher education.

In the innovative Visual Thinking Strategies method, students of Academic Teacher Primary Education at the University of Groningen discuss a work of art, in order to stimulate their awareness and a critical open attitude. They then similarly discuss a video recording of a reading session in a culturally diverse kindergarten class. The aim is to positively influence knowledge, attitudes, and self-efficacy (confidence in one's abilities) with regard to cultural-ethnic diversity in the classroom. This should contribute to the development of intercultural competence of prospective teachers.