10 years of open and online education: best tools and insights in a row
In 2015, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) launched the Open & Online Education incentive scheme to promote open educational resources and online education. The scheme enabled educational institutions to experiment, innovate and share knowledge. After ten years, we take stock: what has the scheme actually delivered for education? And how can you, as an education professional, benefit from it?
The money for the incentive scheme was made available at the time by former minister Jet Bussemaker. In eight grant rounds between 2015 and 2022, project leaders, lecturers, and educationists could apply for grants to improve education. These led to 103 projects that would not have got off the ground without the scheme.
Innovative projects
For example, universities of applied sciences joined forces in the Samen hbo Verpleegkunde project to develop better teaching materials for the nursing programme. Other valuable initiatives include the modular open online textbook Environmental Toxicology and the Virtual Kindergarten tool, in which students can practise group discussions and class management in a simulated environment.
Educational tools
Individual lecturers and researchers also contributed to the innovation. Paul Gobée, winner of the SURF Education Award 2024, developed AnatomyTOOL, a platform with thousands of open anatomy images and practice questions. Another success is IGuideMe, a tool that gives students insight into their learning through dashboards. "It shows how technology can contribute to deepening the learning process," says project leader Erwin van der Vliet. Projects on peer feedback, learning analytics and extended reality (XR) also produced innovative applications such as the VR teaching method Pleitvrij or the virtual classroom.
Events and knowledge dossiers
Besides projects, the scheme also encouraged mutual knowledge sharing. Webinars, workshops, roadmaps, blogs, practical stories and contributions to (inter)national meetings helped education professionals to apply insights and advice gained more widely. All the results mentioned, including a collection of knowledge dossiers, can be found on our website on open and online education (in Dutch)..
SURF's role: support and knowledge sharing
SURF was a driving force behind the incentive scheme from the beginning and played a key role in guiding projects. "We not only supported project leaders with formats, question rounds and inspiration meetings to familiarise education professionals with the incentive scheme, but also ensured that the knowledge gained was widely shared," says Sjieuwke Dankert, Open & Online Education project manager at SURF.
We did this through theme pages, reports and events such as the concluding OOOgstfestival on 23 January 2025. Here, project leaders shared their insights, for example on XR tools for online education, peer feedback and methods for developing open learning materials and making them available to all.
At the OOOgst Festival, we celebrated together the harvest from 10 years of the Open and Online Education Incentive Scheme. Photographer: Lara Varat
Follow-up within Npuls
Despite the successes, continued deployment and further development of innovations is a challenge. Many projects remain stuck in the pilot phase due to a lack of structural funding. "Institutions need to prioritise freeing up time and support for lecturers," Sjieuwke stresses. "This requires not only a culture change within institutions, but also structural support from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Only then can education continue to innovate in the long term."
Fortunately, the ideas of the incentive scheme are being continued within Npuls, with initiatives such as the transformation hub of digital educational resources, schemes like Open Up and Boost your Collection and the edusources community platform (in Dutch). These programmes help educational institutions to continue building open and digital education together.
View all results of stimulus scheme on our website on open and online education (in Dutch).