Anthonius Johannes Maria de Jong

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The University of Tartu has conferred the degree of Honorary Doctor on Professor Emeritus Anthonius Johannes Maria de Jong to recognise him for promoting research in educational technology, educational psychology and instructional design and for his long and fruitful collaboration with the University of Tartu researchers in international projects.

Anthonius Johannes Maria de Jong (Ton de Jong) was born on 8 May 1956. He defended his doctorate at the Eindhoven University of Technology in 1986. During his career, he has worked as an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor at the Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and at the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen in Germany. He has been appointed a fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and elected a member of the Academia Europaea. Ton de Jong has long been committed to developing EARLI, the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, one of the most important European networks connecting educational researchers. In 2004, he founded a Special Interest Group on Inquiry Learning within this association, which still unites researchers in the field worldwide.

In recognition of his outstanding work, Ton de Jong was awarded the Oeuvre Award by EARLI in 2023. In addition, his work has been recognised with numerous other awards, including the European Academic Software Awards for the SimQuest learning environment in 2000, and for the ZAP learning environment in 2004, and the Science magazine award for inquiry-based instruction. Throughout his career, he has led 40 research projects, delivered over 70 invited presentations at international conferences as a keynote speaker and published more than 160 articles in high-level scientific journals, including three articles in Science.

Ton de Jong has been associated with the University of Tartu since 2006, when his close collaboration began, first with the Faculty of Biology and Geography, later with the Faculty of Science and Technology, the Faculty of Social Sciences and Education, and after the structural reform of the university, especially with researchers of the Faculty of Social Sciences. His main role has been helping University of Tartu researchers connect with the global network of educational technology researchers. Ton de Jong’s dedicated work has made it possible to establish a strong educational technology centre at the University of Tartu. Among other things, he has contributed to success in applying for and implementing international research grants, participated in opening an international master’s curriculum, and helped publish and distribute numerous articles. This has resulted in quite a few articles reaching the top 1% of the world’s highly-cited articles in social sciences, according to the Web of Science database.

The University of Tartu’s Centre for Educational Technology is largely built on the network and competences that have reached the university thanks to the EU-funded projects Science Created by You (SCY), Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School (Go-Lab) and Next Generation Stakeholders and Next Level Ecosystem for Collaborative Science Education with Online Labs (Next-Lab) led by Ton de Jong. In addition, as an advisor, he helped successfully implement Ark of Inquiry, the first University of Tartu-coordinated large-scale project under the European Union’s 7^th framework programme.

With his activities, Ton de Jong has helped to significantly enhance the reputation of the University of Tartu and Estonian research worldwide and opened doors for valuable collaboration with strong partners from European countries as well as from North America and Asia.