Critical thinking, analysis, clear communication. Everyone agrees these skills matter, yet in practice they often remain hard to pin down. Until now. “Lecturers immediately recognize this feeling,” says Maxim Tomoszek, lecturer in constitutional law and trainer within the Aurora network. “You want your students to develop these skills, but how do you make that concrete in your course?”
With Learning Outcomes in University for Impact on Society (LOUIS), part of the Aurora competence framework, there is a practical answer.
“This is academic education”
We often refer to them as ‘important competencies’, or ‘soft skills’. But according to Kees Kouwenaar, LOUIS advisor and course coordinator within the Aurora network, that doesn’t quite capture it. “These are not extras. This is what academic education is about.” LOUIS refers to them as transversal competencies: skills that are not tied to a single discipline, but recur across all fields.
Tomoszek: “These are skills you use in everything you do. Not just within your subject, but also beyond academia.” And yet, in many courses they remain implicit. They are ‘somewhere’ in an assignment or exam, but without clearly showing what students are actually practising or at what level. “And many lecturers are already doing this well,” says Kouwenaar. “They start from good intentions. But it’s not always systematic yet.”
That is exactly where the opportunity lies. Not in completely redesigning a course, but in sharpening what is already there. Where in your course do students learn to analyze critically? When do they practise reasoning? And does that build logically over time? Tomoszek: “Once you make that explicit, you can also guide it much more deliberately.”
“It gives language to what is already there”
LOUIS helps make that shift. The framework describes sixteen transversal competencies, broken down into concrete elements and levels.
This makes it possible to design your teaching more precisely:
- What do you want your students to do and learn?
- How complex should that be?
- And how do you build that within your course or programme?
“It gives language to something that already exists,” says Kouwenaar. “And with that, it provides a basis for making choices. Not everything has to change, but what you do becomes more intentional.” Tomoszek: “An assignment phrased slightly differently. A learning objective made more explicit. Or a moment where students reflect on how they arrived at an answer.”
Kouwenaar adds: “And it doesn’t have to be a big change. But once you know what you’re aiming for, something does change. You see it back in your students: in how they reason, how they justify their choices, how they structure their work.”
