Educational quality of the programme
At VUB the quality of the education takes centre stage. This isn't something we say lightly: we scrutinise our programmes regularly to align them with changing student needs in a rapidly changing society.
Our strenghts
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Integration: the current curriculum (°2018-2019) is the result of an intelligent and balanced integration of two former master programmes in molecular biology. The lecturers have put a lot of effort in keeping the very best of both programmes and while doing so they created a coherent curriculum.
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Research focus and hands-on approach: the programme has a strong focus on research and the hands-on approach which includes extensive lab-training, is viewed as a strong asset for this programme. Due to this powerful combination of research focus and hands-on training in the lab, students feel well prepared for a scientific career.
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Interuniversity: students profit from the combination of research specialisations of three different universities (VUB, KULeuven an UAntwerpen) and they get to interact with highly regarded researchers.
Where do we get this information from?
We routinely ask our students to give their honest opinion about the study programme during their academic career. We also consult our professors and assistants and gauge the expectations in the future field of work. Lastly, we receive structured feedback from our former students and compare our programmes with others at home and abroad.
Opportunities for development
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The programme’s connection with external stakeholders - such as the work field - could be strengthened by activating the existing alumni and research networks.
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Take full advantage of the opportunities offered by online tools to recruit students worldwide. Furthermore the creation of a team to select the students would increase the validity of the selection procedure.
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Develop a strategy to integrate more innovative and interactive teaching methods throughout the curriculum and stimulate lecturers to train their teaching skills in these areas.
What is the programme working on now?
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Evaluating and consolidating the new curriculum, including implementing lessons learned from using more digital and online teaching tools.
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The new curriculum is attractive to a more diverse student population. Therefore communication needs to be adapted to the new, more diverse, target audience. At the same time the network with alumni of the previous programmes needs to be kept alive.
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The programme is actively seeking rapprochement with other programmes to further strengthen the curriculum.
This public information is part of VUB’s quality assurance and was approved by the Course Council in 2021.