“Around the world” podcast

Episode 8: Simon Beausaert, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Alexandra Mihai
The Educationalist
Published in
3 min readJun 10, 2022

Welcome to a new edition of the “Educationalist: Around the world” podcast! This week I am delighted to be joined by my colleague Simon Beausaert, Associate Professor of Educational Sciences at the Department for Educational Research and Development, School of Business and Economics (SBE), Maastricht University in The Netherlands.

Simon is director of the Master program Learning and Development in Organisations, where he also teaches and coaches students. He leads the SBE Learning Academy, responsible for supporting faculty professional development, and is a member of the management team of the Educational Institute of the faculty, responsible for faculty development and educational innovation. Simon’s research focuses on how to support workplace learning and on how to organise performance appraisal in the workplace. He is often consulted by schools and organisations on how to strategically support workplace learning, course and curriculum design, performance appraisal and activating didactical methods.

In this podcast, we talk about the faculty development approach developed at the Learning Academy, based on educational research and combining more formal/ structured with informal/ less structured learning, complemented by a variety of resources that can facilitate independent, self-paced learning, mainly online. Simon favours an approach where educational developers play a supportive role, as they inspire and reflect together with faculty on their teaching practice. We also discuss about how the pandemic saw the Learning Academy develop a more iterative and responsive faculty development approach, based on a constant dialogue with faculty to determine their changing needs. Simon gives some interesting examples of initiatives undertaken in the past years, including developing a network of mentors from various departments and offering innovation grants to support faculty ideas for enhancing teaching and learning.

To hear about all this and more, I kindly invite you to listen to our conversation.

“Around the world” podcast- Episode 8: Simon Beausaert (34:46 min)

You can catch up with our previous stories here:

This post is part of the “Around the world” series on faculty development. Watch this space in the coming months for more inspiration on professional development approaches in Higher Education from around the globe.

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Written by Alexandra Mihai

Assistant Professor of Innovation in Higher Education @MaastrichtU. Passionate about designing new learning spaces. My newsletter: educationalist.substack.com