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This exploratory study is about the question of how teachers perceived how their experience with honors education have promoted innovations in their regular education. In this study, we interviewed teachers from four universities of applied sciences about this question. Interviews were conducted in 2019 and 2020, which resulted in 11 cases of innovation in regular programs inspired by experiences with honors education. A first part of this study showed how structural honors characteristics were important in this transfer structural characteristics (Van Eijl, Weerheijm & Pilot, 2023). The research question of the second part focusses on the role of the honors teacher in the innovations. The method of cross-case analysis was chosen. Based on an analysis of the interview data, the results were summarized and illustrated with quotes from the interviews. These innovations are at the level of a single module but also at the level of an entire undergraduate program. Experiences with honors education are frequently mentioned by the teachers as a motivation to work on the innovation of their regular education. These teachers rated the positive effect of honors education for their innovations in regular education as (very) stimulating. In these innovation, the teachers see themselves as "linking-pin", intrinsic motivated to actively transferring experiences from honors programs to innovations in regular programs. According to these teachers honors programs have an interesting innovation potential for regular programs.

At the introduction of honors programs in Dutch higher education, stakeholders assumed that honors education could stimulate innovation in regular education. Whether this assumption holds was researched in the ‘Transfer of honors education to regular education’ project. This article focuses on the question of whether teachers’ experiences with honors education stimulated innovations in regular education and about structural characteristics in relation to the content, teaching formats, and pedagogics of the innovations. Interviews were conducted with teachers from four universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands. The results show that teachers in regular education found honors programs to provide them an opportunity to work with content, teaching formats, and pedagogics that they were unfamiliar with. Through these teachers, the honors approach inspired innovation in regular programs. Strikingly, these innovations contain to some degree all 14 structural characteristics of honors education distinguished in this study. The findings indicate the great innovative potential of honors education for regular education.

As the world is undergoing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), the fusing of physical, digital, and biological worlds with the new technologies, we experience a profound impact of this revolution on the labor markets and subsequent career planning of students. The new economic reality created by 4IR calls for immediate action in the world of higher education. The purpose of this paper is to advocate for new key competencies that university students will need to thrive in the new economy. These competencies include human literacy, digital fluency, hyper-learning, and systems and design thinking. Together, they are presented as the ‘W- shaped 4IR Competency Model’. This model combines previously published opinions about the topic from various educational futurists who have tackled the issue. This paper includes a call to action for universities to address the skills gap challenge of college graduates and rethink their value propositions. As honors programs are the breeding ground for innovation, universities might consider starting to test the robot-proof, twenty-first-century curricula with the smaller honors cohorts and then consider the curricular transfer to the mainstream educational programs. We urge honors educators and administrators around the world to adopt curricula that will make their graduates ‘robot-proof’ and able to thrive in the new economy for decades to come.

Honors education offers students challenging experiences and teachers a laboratory for educational innovation. Successful innovations can stimulate other teachers to experiment and improve their educational practice. This requires that innovations become known to other teachers. For this reason, a project on good practices in honors education has been started in The Netherlands, where good practices in honors education of universities were described and published on a website of the Dutch Honors Network. Until now, 19 good practices are described, 17 from The Netherlands and two from the United States. Nine are selected for this issue. In this introductory paper, the good practice project and research about good practices are described. Different views and principles about honors education are discussed. A series of keywords to bridge the different views and the principles with the nine good practices published in this issue are presented. An analysis of the collected data of the good practices is carried out, followed by conclusions, discussions, and reflections. It appears that six good practices already led to innovations elsewhere in curricula.

Honors programs are frequently regarded as inspiring for redesigning curricula in higher education that incorporate 21st century skills. This explorative study focuses on eliciting students’ perceptions regarding their learning gains related to these skills in honors programs. Results demonstrated high learning gains. Moreover, based on students’ insights, each honors program can be characterized by its own profile regarding the type of 21st century skills. Further, in two honors programs students were asked to compare their learning gains with the perceived learning in their regular program. The majority of students emphasized that their skills were highly promoted in their honors program in comparison with their regular program. Finally, students suggested varying possibilities to incorporate honors activities in their regular program. However, from a curriculum design perspective, adjustments are needed to fit the regular groups of students.

In recent years many honours programmes were introduced at universities and colleges in the Netherlands (Van Eijl, Pilot & Wolfensberger, 2010). An important goal of these programmes is to stimulate students to more fully develop their talents. To get more insight in the process of talent development from the perspective of honours students, we started a project. Forty honours students and honours alumni from eleven different universities and eight of their teachers were interviewed about the development of their talents, why they participated in an honours programme and what their experiences were in those programmes (Van Eijl & Pilot, 2016). These interviews gave an in-depth picture of students’ honours experiences and thereby gave insight into the process of talent development. This process is represented by the Circle of Talent Development. In the second part of this paper (step 9b of the Circle) we focus on the use of honours as laboratory for 21st century skills and the dilemma of teachers between “control and letting go” are discussed.

Can we match formal procedures for quality assurance with the creativity and individuality that defines honours? In a session at the Utrecht Honours Conference 2016: Honours Futures we discussed experiences in quality assurance of honours programmes in the United States of America, the Netherlands and Belgium. To illustrate the possibilities, a case study of using an external audit for honours education and two case studies of the use of internal quality assurance tools in an honours programme were presented. It is concluded that a form of quality assurance is needed to continuously improve. So honours educators must at least care for internal quality control. Student involvement is stimulating for the engagement of all participants in the process of quality control. Internal quality control may result in an annual report. Annual reports can be used both internally and in external quality control.