This was day 1 of the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2025

Plenary opening: advising, watching and celebrating 

Hundreds of professionals from secondary vocational education, higher professional education and university education gathered in the main hall of Amare in The Hague, home to the Royal Conservatoire. Yvonne Rouwhorst and Raymond Reesink kicked off the event.  

The first move was made by Mpho Tutu van Furth, South African Anglican priest, writer and daughter of Desmond Tutu. She brought the philosophy of ubuntu to life, the realisation that we are only human in connection with others. Her message was clear: be strong in (digital) autonomy, but modest in independence. Autonomy does not mean being separate from each other, but standing together in shared values. Every institution has its own challenges, but no one can do it alone. 
 
At the end of the plenary programme, the winners of the SURF Education Awards were announced, or rather guessed. While the nominees stood behind screens, the audience had to guess who would take home the awards based on their shoes and a series of yes/no questions. 
 
And with success. The audience guessed that the Education Award for vocational education went to Menno de Waal (Graafschap College) and that Rik Jager (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and University of Amsterdam) won the award for higher professional education. The Education Award for university education went to Martin Klomp from Delft University of Technology. The Education Award winners had a pink touch: Rik and Menno both work at Npuls. Menno won another award later that day: he also won the Audience Award. 

Networking area and sessions: faster together 

After the festive announcement, participants flocked to the networking area. There, they could network while enjoying coffee made by a barista, visit the Npuls stand   and literally get education moving together by cycling on MBO, HBO and WO bikes. The record of 00.43 seconds can still be broken on day 2, with the tip: in this cycling game, you really do go faster together than alone, even without barista coffee.  
 
Npuls organised ten sessions on this first day. Institutions exchanged not only successes, but also lessons learned.  
 
A few highlights from the sessions:  

• Strengthen the Learning Culture: evidence-informed working is an important key to success in making a learning culture thrive. However, institutions still face many challenges when it comes to sharing knowledge: how do you remove the barriers for teachers and education professionals to share knowledge and materials? How do you create a central point for collecting and disseminating knowledge (such as a CTL) and how do you obtain sufficient capacity/manpower for this? How do you move on to the next phase of your (knowledge) network? Experience shows that a personal approach, trust and mutual connection are conducive to creating support and thus further disseminating knowledge.
• European Perspectives on Generative AI: the international panel quickly identified a common denominator: despite the differences between countries, the challenges surrounding AI are virtually the same. After a survey of the audience, AI literacy among teaching staff and learners was mentioned as the main topic. However, even with a common challenge, perspectives differ per country and challenge. For this reason alone, it is important to meet more often in the form of hackathons, labs or other meetings or partnerships for knowledge sharing.
• Study progress and social bonding, stimulated with Learning Analytics (LA): a consortium of vocational, higher professional and university education took centre stage. How can teachers use LA in a targeted way to monitor students' study progress? And how do teachers and students experience this? From supporting the learning process to giving students insight into their own learning process. There is a wide variety of ways in which LA can be used. It is important to involve students in this and to put humanity first, with less focus on learning analytics as a concept and more on its reach.  
• EduGenAI: the session on EduGenAI focused on the opportunities and challenges of generative AI for, by and with education. Because now is the time to do it together. We looked at what is needed to build a secure and independent ecosystem that does justice to public values such as privacy, security and transparency. We also looked at themes such as architecture and how we, as educators, can choose suitable AI models for educational purposes. Finally, we looked at how we can use the pilot phase of EduGenAI to discover how we can refine existing and new functionalities for educational practice.  

Test your AI knowledge!

The day ended with an AI quiz led by Anna Posthumus Meyjes-de Breij, lecturer and curriculum coordinator at Leiden University of Applied Sciences. Visitors left Amare with their heads full of ideas and new connections. The next move? With more insight, knowledge and connection, we know that it's up to all of us tomorrow, on day two.