Students working together with societal partners can be challenging, since it is not self-evident for them to know how to deal with those partners. Researcher Crystal Smit was wondering: ‘’We researchers believe that it is essential to involve relevant stakeholders in development of solutions for societal challenges, such as health-related interventions, why don’t we teach our students how to do this?” The Sprint project Start with Impact tries to bridge this gap by developing e-modules to support students with stakeholder engagement. How to identify relevant stakeholders? How to effectively communicate with stakeholders? How to use design thinking/ visual thinking to facilitate complex challenges with multiple stakeholders?

The goal of this project was to develop a set of teaching modules that can be applied across various Bachelor’s and Master’s courses. These modules will help students to improve stakeholder engagement and provide the students  with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively collaborate with societal stakeholders, such as healthcare providers, community organizations or policy makers.

Testing the modules

A key feature of the modules is its open and modular design, which makes it easy to use on platforms of other universities. It also allows for using only selected parts of the modules, or adding new content, which enables the continuous evolution of the modules. Most of the content for the modules was developed from scratch, based primarily on academic literature. The development of the modules was done in collaboration with ‘Impact At The Core’, an initiative of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR).

The modules were tested in an EUR Bachelor’s minor course “Positive behaviour change in the digital age”, lasting for ten weeks. The project team continuously monitored and evaluated the progress and made necessary adjustments at the end of the minor to have a successful methodology and teaching modules. The methodology and teaching modules cover stakeholder engagement and management, as well as skills in communication with stakeholders. Students also received insights on design thinking and participatory design to help them create solutions in co-creation with academic staff, societal stakeholders and other target audiences.

Conclusion and follow-up 

The project delivered eight fully developed teaching modules for students, each accompanied by relevant in-class assignments. All the modules are freely accessible through the ‘Impact At The Core’ Knowledge platform:

https://www.eur.nl/en/impactatthecore/knowledge-platform-impact-driven-education/societal-impact-joint-mission/working-together-societal-stakeholders/e-modules-students-collaborating-external-partners

Impact at the Core provided additional funding in 2024 to support the redesign of the modules and the integration of feedback collected during the pilot testing in the minor course.