Startup in Residence EdTech program

For this purpose, Tilburg University has recently entered the pilot program "Startup in Residence EdTech”, that facilitates collaboration between higher education institutions and creative educational technology startups on solving complex educational challenges.

What is Startup in Residence EdTech program?

The EdTech working group for educational innovation within the Acceleration Plan is launching the Startup in Residence (SiR) EdTech program. For six months, universities will work together with innovative companies on challenges within higher education, where educational technology offers a possible solution. Startups get the opportunity to work on a solution with a university. Additionally, during this incubation phase, a mentoring and training program is followed by both parties, focusing on specific themes that are relevant during the process. Various higher education institutions are looking for an EdTech solution for a challenge they are facing. These challenges vary from a new cloud solution to improving the response rate of course evaluations. The goal of the SiR Edtech program is to develop a solution for these challenges through co-creation. You can find all the information on www.startupinresidence.com/edtech.

Tilburg University’s challenges

EDUiLAB, the Educational Innovation Lab at Tilburg University, has contributed two challenges in collaboration with Marijke Markus (Tilburg School of Economics and Management) and Inge van Rijt (Tilburg Law School). Nikos Basbas (EDUiLAB) states: "It is a great opportunity to collaborate with EdTech startups on our road to solving complex educational challenges. We are hoping to find solutions for two challenges that every higher education institution will recognize (1) a lack of quality and quantity of student feedback through course evaluations, and (2) very high staff workload when grading essays in large courses.”

Increasing evaluation response rates

It has been a struggle to get a good amount of responses for course and lecturer evaluations at the end of the course. A low response rate means that evaluation results are of no- to little value. The university department would like to find ways to get the response rate up, but also to increase the quality of feedback in open-ended questions. Therefore, the challenge to startups is to contribute to the increase of response rates to acceptable levels of course and teacher evaluations to gather usable feedback and data which can be used to improve the quality of education.

Grading essays in large courses

Within the School of Law of Tilburg University, open-ended questions are used in testing where the student must build an argument. This form of testing matches the learning objectives of the various law courses. The downside of this form of testing is that lecturers might get overworked by the workload of marking the tests. Therefore, the challenge to startups is to contribute to a solution with which lecturers can efficiently mark open questions for exams with very large quantities of students without losing the quality of the grading and the feedback possibilities it offers.

Do you recognize those challenges in your daily work and would you like to collaborate on solving those challenges with creative companies? Or do you know a start-up that could help us solve the challenge? Send an email to eduilab@tilburguniversity.edu.