Steve Pickering, one of the Core Lecturers for the programme, excitedly: “The first two weeks have been a dream. Students are enthusiastic and hugely motivated. You get to experience that right away. Beforehand, we were enormously nervous as a team; a lot can go wrong. We completely changed the way we teach to a flipped classroom. Instead of lectures with a teacher in front of the group, we give group-oriented lessons in which students get to work themselves and the teacher is present as a facilitator. It was proven years ago that our average attention span is 23 minutes: so why not do things better? Students are given a lot of space, literally in rooms in the J/K building at Roeterseiland Campus that have been converted to dedicated learning spaces and figuratively, and they have so far been passionate about the projects they are working on for external stakeholders. Even with so much space and freedom, they sometimes sit in groups all day to discuss and work together. We as Core Lecturers are also still searching: by seeing what works and what doesn't, we can keep adjusting the programme.'

Challenges in society

Co-founder and programme director is Eelke Heemskerk. He explains what the study entails: “If you look around the university campuses, you see students and teachers who are really passionate about addressing the big problems facing our society. Think inequality, think climate change, or other big problems. We want to make an impact. We want to work with stakeholders in society. That's where inequality really comes to light and where people are trying to come up with solutions. With a programme like Computational Social Science, we do exactly that. Not only do we teach students theory to better understand and unravel the complexity of big societal questions, but we also equip them with a digital toolbox of data methods. Students become able to develop digital solutions and interventions to these big questions. They not only understand how algorithms affect society and how we should regulate them, but they can also look under the bonnet and modify those algorithms.”

The programme integrates four areas of expertise: social sciences and humanities, digital expertise, research expertise and 'changemaking' expertise. The latter is especially innovative. “In most degree programmes, your job is not to make the world a better place, just to analyse it. Change is then up to decision-makers,” Pickering explains, “This Bachelor’s assumes the opposite: you are going to study this computational social science to make the world a better place. In doing so, we take the social sciences and humanities as a basis for understanding your own position in society. Then we teach students not to throw everything over, but to change things from this position. For this, we have the digital stream: statistics, visualisations, algorithms. These are not taught in normal humanities and social science studies. While in fact there is data everywhere and that is only growing.”