Since the end of August 2026, a new generation of minors has been running at Erasmus MC: nine 30-credit programmes in which medical students work alongside students from other faculties and disciplines on broad, socially relevant issues. This is the result of a multi-year process involving the development of new teaching content, but also the fundamental change of the lecturer's role, assessment methods and a new organisational framework. Minor coordinator Gert Jansen and Tanja van Kempen, coordinator for lecturer professional development, set up this process together, with support from Risbo. They look back on how it went.
A long-cherished aspiration
The story does not begin in 2026, but a few years earlier, when Erasmus MC set out its vision and ambition for 2030: to be a hospital of broad social significance, whilst also training doctors who are not only clinically skilled, but also socially engaged and well-versed in academic and technological matters. The new medical curriculum, which has been rolled out since 2023, thus emphasises not only the academic training of doctors, but also explicitly the technological and socio-cultural components of the profession. This shift was also to be reflected in the range of minors on offer, which until then had mainly consisted of in-depth 15-credit minors within the medical faculty.
The Leiden-Delft-Erasmus collaboration (LDE) gave rise to a desire to extend the minor programme scope from 15 to 30 credits, and to encourage students to undertake a broadening minor outside their own discipline or faculty, or even outside the Netherlands. Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity became the guiding principles in this regard: whilst multidisciplinary collaboration means that different experts work on a problem from within their own fields of expertise, interdisciplinary collaboration goes a step further: working together to find solutions based on shared issues. Transdisciplinary work also involves, from the outset, stakeholders from outside the academic world, such as patients, local authorities or social partners.
Development process
Early 2023, Gert was tasked with launching a project to develop these new, broadening minors. “The project began with setting up a sound project organisation and a rigorous selection process, together with project manager Mariëlle Went and educational specialist Marit Wijnen. We invited all interested lecturers and the teams involved at the time to submit proposals, based on new criteria, for a 30-credit broadening minor. These proposals were then assessed in consultation with a number of programme directors and students, after which ten new minors were ultimately selected.”
A new role for lecturers
That’s when the actual development work really began. Erasmus MC wanted not only different content, but also a different approach to teaching: a shift from knowledge-driven teaching to competence-based teaching, focusing on skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and interprofessional communication. Tanja explains that this was also a transition: “For some colleagues, who were already moving in that direction to some extent in the existing minors, it was a small step. For others, it represented a truly fundamental shift in the way they taught and assessed, and in the way the entire programme is structured over ten or twenty weeks. So that took some getting used to.”
“Lecturers clearly need to take on a different role here and adopt a much more coaching-based approach to teaching,” she goes on to explain: “So, rather than acting as subject matter experts who impart knowledge to a group, they must guide students through a process in which the students themselves seek out knowledge and take responsibility for their own skills development.” “Sometimes a project lasting fifteen or twenty weeks can feel very uncertain for students at the start, and as a lecturer you might be tempted to give them quick answers or steer them in the right direction,” adds Gert. “But you have to get used to the fact that this is a process the student has to go through.”
Risbo’s role: from vision to assessment format
As Erasmus MC’s in-house educational expertise was largely devoted to the reform of the medical curriculum itself, there was a need for external support. This was not merely a question of capacity: the required teaching approach was so fundamentally different that the teaching teams needed specialist guidance in formulating their educational vision and in translating it into a coherent programme.
Risbo provided educational guidance to the ten teaching teams: it worked with each team to develop a shared vision and structure the minor programme in accordance with the principles of constructive alignment (the alignment between learning objectives, teaching methods and assessment). Risbo also organised joint working sessions and masterclasses on transdisciplinary working, assessment and stakeholder management. “What I appreciated about working with Risbo was that they were very clear about their role. So they didn’t take over the organising, but consistently handed responsibility back to the teaching teams themselves, even if that meant not everything was ready on time. At the same time, they provided a tailor made approach for each team and made adjustments where necessary, partly thanks to their experience with similar educational development projects,” Gert reflects.
Assessment in a competence-based programme
The shift towards competence-based education also had significant implications for assessment. Instead of a traditional summative final assessment, the new minors utilise formative, interim assessments and partial deliverables that students submit throughout the programme. A minor often culminates in a specific final product: in the Toxicology minor, for example, students work on an information magazine, whilst in other minors they produce an ‘explainer’, a video or a vodcast – always a combination of interim process steps and a final product that requires creativity but must also be academically sound. The minors use Canvas for all stages: this is where students submit their work, receive feedback and are ultimately assessed.
It'll be fine
Patricia Eikemans-Verwer is an internist at Erasmus MC and the minor coordinator for the new minor ‘Facts over myths: on health, hypes and science’. She previously coordinated an in-depth minor. To develop the programme, she collaborated with Mandy den Hollander and Sandra Lousberg from Risbo, who helped build the minor entirely ‘from scratch’: starting with discussions about vision, objectives and competencies. At first, this felt vague and overwhelming: “We all had plenty of expertise and teaching experience, but not so much in curriculum development outside our own specialist fields. So how do you go about it?! Sandra kept repeating: ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.’ That encouragement was sorely needed, and according to Patricia, the frameworks Risbo created for this made all the difference. The turning point came when we filled in the storyboard, detailing each week and each lesson: ‘That was the moment we started to feel comfortable and things began to fall into place.’
"A key learning point (...) was the realisation that you’re not actually assessing content, but the process. So it’s not so much about the content of a final product, but about the journey and development leading up to it.”
Patricia herself teaches a lot within the minor and so, as a lecturer, she also had to adapt to the new way of working: “I really dreaded the multidisciplinary aspect. I knew what a third-year medical student is capable of and what they know, but I really had no idea about a third-year business administration or economics student, for example. That caused me a lot of anxiety.” During the Senior Teaching Qualification (SKO) programme, which she undertook alongside the minor’s development, she gained a key insight. “A key learning point in that initial phase of the SKO was the realisation that you’re not actually assessing content, but the process. So it’s not so much about the content of a final product, but about the journey and development leading up to it.” It gave her the confidence that everything would turn out all right, and she in turn passed that confidence on to her fellow coordinators. Because, as she herself sums it up: it really was a huge undertaking that they tackled and completed.
In conclusion
Erasmus MC’s new minors have now got underway, and initial feedback from lecturers and students has been positive. In the longer term, Gert and Tanja see scope for further collaboration with other universities and even universities of applied sciences, although that is still a long way off for the time being. Further information on the individual minors can be found on the Erasmus MC minors page.
