Audience Award
The SURF Onderwijsawards were presented today. The awards recognise educational innovators who make a significant contribution to educational innovation with ICT. These three educational innovators stand a chance of winning the Audience Award.
Vote for your favourite!
Help us celebrate the incredible contributions of our education innovators by voting for your favourite! Here are the nominees:
Martin ensures that his open-source robotics education programme MIRTE is accessible to all levels: children are introduced to robotics by dragging and combining cubes, students work with Python, and researchers use the Robot Operating System (ROS), the international standard in robotics research. The hardware is open source and modular. This allows a simple robot of a few dozen to grow into an advanced research robot.
"Nice how he brings robotics to all levels of education and provides appropriate solutions everywhere. What Martin is doing is extremely valuable, he is not only building technology, but also a community."
Menno de Waal
With his work within both Graafschap College and Npuls, Menno has had national impact. He initiated the portal tgo.mbo.edusources.nl, a platform where mbo institutions can share and reuse digital learning resources. He also played a key role in the development of the learning resources covenant, which lays down agreements on the use of open and paid learning resources in mbo.
"Menno is not only an inspired booster, but also someone who anchors OERs in both policy and practice. His impact is felt nationally. Menno stands out for the way he connects institutions and activates teachers. He shows how openness, cooperation and vision together can lead to structural change in secondary vocational education."
Rik Jager
With the introduction of UvA AI Chat and HvA AI Chat, Rik has realised an infrastructure that gives institutions themselves as much control as possible over data and privacy. This technical separation between user interface and language models allows for the most responsible use of generative AI in education and research.
"What Rik has developed has national impact - truly innovative and current with an eye on privacy. Rik is enthusiastic with a clear vision, and has great knowledge of developments in the market in the field of generative AI."