by Praneet Khandal, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Remember the time when education was disrupted not by new technology but by a global pandemic? It was, however, these new technologies that helped us get back to some sense of normality, to resume education across universities. This disruption gave everyone the opportunity to get creative with offering online education options for their students. While the story of our faculty experimenting with hybrid educational spaces began in 2020, 5 years later we are still tapping into the potential these spaces offer beyond the pandemic.
During that time, our faculty experimented and piloted a project for developing hybrid rooms which could offer a mix of offline and online education for our students. We started with two rooms and ran a pilot with a bachelor’s program which was evaluated a year later. Combing the best components of the two pilots we expanded to more rooms and currently have eight different rooms and intend to have up to twenty in our new campus in January 2026 in the center of The Hague.
However, as we all know and experienced, everyone was keen on returning to campus and fight off the digital fatigue and, as a result, hybrid education was reserved for exceptional circumstances. Such a transition came with its own conflicts: on the one hand the university was keen on digitalization of education but on the other hand, offline education promised a stronger academic community. But we were left with the question of what do we do with the technology we had invested in to develop the hybrid spaces?
This transition fortunately coincided with the Virtual International Cooperation project funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science between 2021 and 2024. The main idea of the fund was to support and offer internationalisation at home for students studying in the Netherlands. Through this grant, four of our lecturers were able to establish collaboration projects across four different regions-South Africa, Myanmar, Gaza and Germany and a fifth project will be executed soon in Chile.
Although each collaboration was at a different stage of digital pedagogical transformation, the common theme focused on some of the major global challenges. The project addressed various critical topics such as mental health, climate change, and the intersection of global health and sustainability. These discussions allowed students to share their local contexts and learn from one another’s diverse perspectives on pressing global issues. It explored the challenges and successes each has encountered, focusing on three main areas: 1) Driving Forces for Virtual Education Transformation, 2) Challenges and Barriers to Virtual Learning Exchange, Lessons Learned, and 3) Pathways for Progress for Virtual Learning Exchange.
Overall, the lessons learnt from these collaborations were two-fold. Firstly, in terms of content, students learnt the importance of cross-cultural collaboration, developed interdisciplinary research skills and other digital literacy competencies. In addition, the opportunity to connect with practitioners and international counterparts gave the students an opportunity to understand in real time some of the challenges they could expect to face themselves in their future careers. Secondly, the project also demonstrated the potential of hybrid learning spaces in making education accessible and inclusive.
Of course, it was neither easy nor perfect, but it does offer a better alternative than just pure online education. The challenges of maintaining expensive equipment and coordinating different time zones is a mammoth task, but the pay offs are certainly worth it. Lastly, the project was an important learning moment for everyone involved and, upon further reflection, we also think this holds further potential in making research collaborations more sustainable, cost effective and accessible, especially for early career researchers.
If you are curious to know more about each individual collaboration or have any other questions, comments, feedback or would just like to connect, then please get in touch at p.khandal@fgga.leidenuniv.nl. Thanks for reading!
Praneet Khandal is an ICT and Educational Officer at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs at Leiden University, The Netherlands.
