Project introduction and background information
The BSW programme personal development path is an educational innovation initiative aimed at implementing the three-year course focusing on students' personal development. The course was developed in response to recurring feedback from students, and observations by the Programme Committee (PC) and programme director on the following issues:
• Limited attention in the current curriculum to professional orientation, academic skills, and scientific development.
• Disconnection between introductory courses and real-world research or applications, hindering students from seeing the societal relevance of their field.
• Students perception of the programme as a series of unrelated courses (“separate bricks”) rather than an integrated structure, leading to missed connections that could enhance learning.
• Lack of structured opportunities for students to reflect on their study choices, future paths (e.g., their BSc thesis or MSc specialisations), and their role as Earth scientists in society.
In response, the project team—comprising staff, the Pyrus study association, and support from the Education Support Centre—designed the Ribbon Course to:
• Foster student ownership of learning through an individual learning path.
• Create a supportive learning community that encourages reflection and connection across courses.
• Encourage students to develop awareness of their knowledge, skills, attitudes, and their impact on science and society.
Objective and expected outcomes
Students in the BSc programme Soil, Water, Atmosphere start a journey that is part of a longer path; a path started in their high school years, and that will lead to their first jobs somewhere in the distant future. That path, however, is not fixed and prescribed, and it is up to students to find a path that suits them best.
The objective of this course is thus, to help students navigate their BSc programme. Finding their path involves developing skills, knowledge and attitudes, finding the connections between all those interesting and challenging courses, selecting courses and developing themselves into a budding scientists, ready to make the next step after completion of their BSc.
At the end of the course (that is: at the and of their BSc journey) students are expected to be able to:
- LO1: Analyse connections between knowledge, skills and attitudes obtained in various programme courses, and choose their own learning path.
- LO2: Relate current scientific research and societal development to the content of programme courses and critically appraise course content.
- LO3: Evaluate their own progress in respect to academic and domain specific skills.
- LO4: Adhere to guidelines for proper academic conduct.
- LO5: Value to work in intercultural and (otherwise) diverse environments.
To reach the objective of this course we employ the following:
1. Live, Structured Contact Moments
Regular in-person meetings (five per year) provide essential space for reflection, planning, and peer interaction. These sessions increase student engagement and help structure their skill development across the three years of study.
2. Personalised Skill Selection and Goal Setting
Allowing students to choose which skills they want to develop gives them ownership over their learning path. Annual planning activities (e.g. learning goals workshops) help students focus and stay motivated.
3. Integration with Course Content
The PDP connects with existing courses by encouraging students to use real assignments and learning moments to reflect on and demonstrate skill development. This makes skill learning more relevant and meaningful.
4. Guided Reflection Using Rubrics and Portfolios
Students use rubrics, self-assessments, and online portfolios to reflect on their progress. These tools help make the learning process visible and tangible, especially for abstract or soft skills.
5. Personal Contact with Teachers and Coordinators
Students highly value accessible guidance. Teacher involvement—especially in feedback, coaching, and reflection guidance—is critical for the success of PDP. The shift from a hands-off online approach to more live interaction significantly improved outcomes.
6. Feedback-Driven Course Design
The PDP was revised based on thorough student feedback, making it more tailored and relevant. Students were actively involved in shaping how the course evolved, which boosted engagement and ownership.
7. Collaboration with the Study Association (Pyrus)
Working with the student association adds an informal, peer-supported element to skill development, and strengthens the learning community around the PDP.
Results and learnings
Project achievements:
The project successfully designed and implemented a coherent, multi-year skills trajectory within the BSc Soil, Water and Atmosphere programme, ensuring that personal and professional development became an integral, visible part of the curriculum. Through the creation of the Personal Development Path (PDP), the project introduced a structured framework that enables students to reflect on their learning, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and actively shape their professional identity throughout their studies.
A major achievement was the establishment of a yearly sequence of five PDP meetings where students set learning goals, monitor their progress, and receive feedback from academic mentors. This created a continuous developmental thread that connects individual courses and learning experiences across the entire bachelor’s programme. The project also developed clear rubrics and assessment tools that help both students and instructors articulate skill development in areas such as self-awareness, reflection, teamwork, and leadership.
The PDP has significantly improved coherence and visibility of skill development within the BSW programme. It has enhanced student ownership and engagement by allowing personalized learning goals, while ensuring structure and academic guidance through recurring contact moments. In addition, the project strengthened collaboration among teaching staff, aligning perspectives on learning outcomes and reflection practices.
Finally, the project has generated a tested model for skills education that can be shared with other study programmes: a combination of structured reflection, student autonomy, and continuous mentoring. This model demonstrates that professional and personal development can be taught explicitly, assessed meaningfully, and embedded sustainably in a scientific curriculum.
Project impact:
The project has had a substantial impact both within and beyond the BSc Soil, Water and Atmosphere programme. By developing and successfully implementing a structured skills learning trajectory, it demonstrated a practical model for integrating personal and professional development into a scientific curriculum. The outcomes of the project — including the PDP framework, rubrics, and reflective learning structure — have since been shared across departments, inspiring and guiding other programme teams to adopt similar approaches. Through ongoing collaboration and workshops with teaching staff, the project has fostered a growing community of practice focused on skills education, reflection, and student ownership. This has strengthened institutional awareness of the importance of professional skills training and has contributed to a broader cultural shift toward embedding reflective, competence-oriented learning across the university.
Lessons learned while working on the project:
1. Lack of Student Reflection Skills
Many students initially struggle with reflecting on their own skills, attitudes, and knowledge, especially when it comes to setting personal learning goals or evaluating their development. This highlights the need for explicit instruction on how to reflect and self-assess effectively.
2. Limited Personal Contact in Early Versions
The first version of the course relied too much on online assignments with minimal teacher involvement. Students thus, missed personal interaction and felt disconnected. The revised course includes more live meetings, which prove essential for students' course engagement and learning.
3. Student Motivation and Ownership
While some students embrace skills learning, others lack motivation—especially when they do not understand the relevance of skills or view them as “soft” or secondary. Creating internal motivation remains a challenge, particularly in non-graded, zero-credit course.
4. Coordination and Workload for Teaching Staff
Managing a PDP that spans three years and includes personalized student pathways requires significant coordination, feedback, and facilitation. Staff time and compensation are limited, particularly because the course carries no ECTS credits, making it harder to sustain teacher involvement.
5. Curricular Integration and Visibility
Although the PDP is linked to the programme, it is still a separate course. Ensuring consistent connection with domain courses and making skill learning visible across the curriculum remains a work in progress.
6. Long-Term Embedding and Resources
Securing long-term support—such as budget, structural staff time, and alignment with broader curriculum development—is difficult. This limits the ability to expand or deepen the course's sustainably.
Recommendations
Based on the experiences from the BSc Soil, Water and Atmosphere (BSW) programme, we recommend that other degree programmes implement a structured, student-centred skills trajectory that emphasizes reflection, ownership, and personal contact. The project showed that students engage more deeply when they can select and monitor their own learning goals within a clear framework of guidance and feedback. The redesigned Personal Development Path (PDP) combines autonomy with structure by offering a yearly cycle of focused meetings, each dedicated to goal-setting, reflection, and skills integration.
Findings from the project highlight that regular live meetings and personal contact with teachers are essential for meaningful reflection, while embedding skills learning across courses and extracurricular activities fosters coherence and real-world relevance. Furthermore, students often require explicit instruction in self-assessment and reflection to recognize their progress and connect academic learning to professional growth. To ensure long-term success, programmes should secure institutional support, maintain open feedback loops with students, and remain flexible to adapt the structure based on evolving needs.
Practical outcomes
As a culminating component of their Personal development Path experience, students complete a comprehensive reflective analysis assignment that documents and synthesizes their personal leadership development. This exercise requires them to articulate their conceptual understanding of leadership, examine formative experiences from coursework and extracurricular activities, and demonstrate metacognitive awareness of how their capabilities have evolved. By critically analyzing their growth across academic, collaborative, and professional contexts, students not only showcase their learning but also connect individual development to their future roles as emerging leaders in their chosen fields.
Analysing reflection assignment of the first 13 students graduating from the personal development path, we conclude the following: There is a clear misalignment between WUR’s Vision for Education 2025 and students’ perceptions of their own leadership development (see attached document) . While WUR emphasizes collaborative, community-oriented learning to prepare leaders for complex global challenges, students primarily view leadership as an individual, experience-based process, focusing on personal achievements and self-reflection rather than learning from peers or recognizing the integrated design of their education. Although students demonstrate intrinsic motivation and reflective capacity, their limited recognition of collaborative learning may constrain their effectiveness in multi-stakeholder contexts. These findings suggest that WUR could enhance leadership development by making collaborative learning more explicit, fostering metacognitive awareness of educational design, and balancing opportunities for individual and collective growth, while also acknowledging the generational lens through which students interpret leadership development.