E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Since 2013, over 250 TU Delft lecturers have been developing and delivering online education. Thanks to their enterprising efforts and the dedication of the TU Delft Extension School (ES) support staff, TU Delft has contributed to educating the world and enhancing campus education.

Open and online education at TU Delft has had a positive impact on various areas beside benefiting campus education, from widening access to high quality education for hundreds of thousands, to contributing to our University’s international standing, from developing educational innovation and conducting pedagogical research, to forging industry collaboration.

This impact report gives a good overview of our activities and the impact we have had.

Key benefits

Online education gives academic staff new tools for research, valorisation and dissemination, as well as community building. For many lecturers, it also creates an opportunity to improve campus courses, innovate their teaching, and it adds to their professional development. It contributes to enhance networks and international recognition, in both academia and industry. Additionally, the findings from the research we conduct in online learning are applied to inform best practices in teaching, and to improve the learning experience on campus and online. 

The support given by ES instructional designers and learning developers to academic staff - be they tenured professors, first year associates, or even student Dream Teams – has also resulted in a variety of educational innovations, such as new tools, animations, online labs, simulations, assessment methods, serious games and various technology applications.

Looking ahead

​​​​​​​In recent years, our online offering centred on key topics – energy transition, sustainable cities and the future of transportation – that are relevant to the University’s mission of contributing solutions to grand societal challenges. Looking ahead, we uphold our mission of providing quality education to people of all ages, backgrounds and nationalities, by continuing to offer our MOOCs with an open licence. At the same time, we focus on further growing a continuing education portfolio of modular and stackable programmes for working professionals.

Read the Extension School Impact Report 2020.

In November Open Education Global was planning to organise the OEGlobal2020 conference in Taiwan. After extensive consultations with the main Conference host, Taipei Medical University, as well as the Open Education Global Board of Directors, the decision was made to transition the OE Global 2020 Conference into a hybrid event which will include virtual and potentially some face-to-face events. We believe that this is the right decision for our community, as we all work to manage our way through this period of disruption and concern.   

OE Global 2020 Conference will take place virtually through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous activities. The 2020 conference theme, Connecting the Global Open Education Community, signifies even more to our community during this unprecedented time. Social connection avenues will be a strategic part of the conference to provide additional opportunities for participants to engage about the content of presentations and in networking/collaboration opportunities. 

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https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/making-blended-education-work/1Part of the EMBED project is the development and running of a MOOC about blended education and using the EMBED framework. Last week the enrolment opened on FutureLearn for our MOOC "Making Blended Education Work":

On this course, you’ll explore emerging practices in blended learning and get introduced to a maturity model developed in a partnership of seven European higher education organisations.
You’ll work through debates related to the conceptualisation and practice of blended learning, as well as examples of blended designs at course, programme, and institutional level.
This course offers a platform to share your experience of blended learning, evaluate and advance the maturity of your blended learning practices, and innovate blended learning methods in the wider context of digital transformation.

This course will introduce concepts of blended learning, blended teaching, and blended education and you will learn more about the EMBED framework to assess the maturity of blended learning practices in course, programme, and institution levels at higher education. It also includes topics that look into critical dimensions of blended learning, such as relations between beliefs and practice, institutional culture and leadership, and post-digital thinking.

This course is designed for higher education institution leaders, particularly those involved in leading the design, implementation and research into blended learning (e.g. those leading learning technology teams, those directing academic programmes, and heads of academic departments). The course also covers topics relevant to learning technologists, practitioners, and researchers who are interested in blended learning related research and implementation strategy.

The course starts on May 11th and will run for 5 weeks. The expected study load is 2 hours per week. You can enroll on Futurelearn.

Many of us are forced to work from home due to the Corona virus. For most of us, this is a new experience to do this not just for one day, but for a couple of weeks. For a lot of people their agendas are clearing out and they have some extra time. The perfect time to do some learning from home! Delft University is quickly changing all our campus education to remote teaching and learning. The expertise we build up with the Extension School comes in good use for that, but we continue to run the Extension School as well. So here is a selection of online courses that can help you through the days and weeks ahead.

Your kids

Many of you have to home school your kids. To give them something to do, we relaunched our Scratch MOOCs for kids to learn to programme. We offer this course in Dutch and English. We also offer a teacher (that is you) version of this course in Dutch and English. If your kids are a bit older, we also have a course on pre-university calculus.

Energy Transition

Before this crisis started there was a lot of media attention for the energy transition. If you are interested to learn more about this we have a whole bunch of courses on this topic. From solar energy to electric cars to zero energy design to the economics of energy transition.

Transportation

Are you more interested in transportation? We have a very interesting programme on railway engineering or more about the future of transportation with the hyperloop.

Sustainable Cities

A big topic in our portfolio is also about sustainable cities. From rethinking the city to treatment of urban sewage and sustainable urban development.

Skills for Engineers

If you are more interested in developing your skills, we have courses on project management, leadership, visualising, design leadership and innovation. Or very practical skill with Unix Tools or Data Analytics in Excel (in Spanish).

Small Business

For small business owners these are extremely difficult times. They might have to redesign their business model to survive this crisis. We have a programme developed to help them with business model innovation.

Open Science

Most research labs are also closed, so this might be a great opportunity to look into Open Science.

Conclusion

The TU Delft Extension School has many courses online that can help you through these difficult times. I hope you find an interesting course in our portfolio on our online learning website. If you are interested in bulk enrolment for your company please contact us.

Yesterday I wrote about the ambiguous times for online learning. I received a lot of positive feedback on it. During the day my former team of Teaching & Learning Services has been working on a quick guide for our TU Delft lecturers. The page offers suggestions for them on how to continue offering education in a remote setting including a list of all the tools.

Teaching & Learning Services

In 2018 this team was created as a merger of different support groups. It is a team of 30 staff members and many student assistants who support both campus as online education. That means that the team already has extensive knowledge about online education and the learning technology to support this. To give an idea about what we have:

• First-line support is manned by trained student assistants. Regular occupation is 4 per shift, but this can be scaled up.
• We have four Learning Technology Support Officers (1 on maternity leave) who are responsible for the support website, documentation, more advanced questions and digital exam creation in MapleTA. They make the connection with other experts of Functional Management, ICT and Learning Developers.
• We have two Instructional Designers who know everything about the platforms and the integrated tools we support. That is Brightspace for campus courses and (open)edX for our Extension School courses.
• We have 14 Learning Developers who are all pedagogical experts and experienced in designing and running blended and online courses.

And I shouldn't forget the two coordinators, who are doing a great job in organising and prioritising all the activities. Since 1st of March they also are acting managers of the team until there is a new me. They are definitely up to the task!

Creating this team, and integration support for both campus and online courses, seems to be a really good decision in the current situation. It makes me proud to see what they are doing in these challenging times and how they are helping our lecturers.

Extra support

We are aware that these are special times and that is why we prioritized the support of lecturers. They even opened up support this weekend:

Weekend Support: from campus to online teaching
As you may have noticed, the web page for teachers has been published yesterday: https://brightspace-support.tudelft.nl/remote-teaching-learning/.

This weekend, extra support for TU Delft lecturers is available. The helpdesk, learning developers, and functional admin are actively supporting teaching staff in moving campus education to online education. This includes email requests for online learning tools, technical queries, as well as didactical advice. All questions can be directed to brightspace@tudelft.nl.

What is really good here is that it is not just the first line support. It is both the technical and didactical second line support as well.

New to remote teaching

For many of our lecturers remote teaching is something completely new. We are working on additional content to help you through this process. The most important advice is that you have to accept that you can't do everything. No one is expecting you to directly replicate your course. You have to focus on what you teach and prioritise on the theoretical concepts. These are relatively easy to convert.
Also, keep the production simple, it is not about being perfect, it is about having something for the students. If you already have a powerpoint slidedeck, recording a voice talking over your powerpoint is simple and easy to do.

One of the challenging things to do online is assessment. Especially if you are coming from written exams. Focus on the alignment of the online assessment to the prioritised learning objectives. The team is working on more extensive information about assessment. We have another 4 weeks before the exam period starts. We can't do everything in a weekend.

Since last week my main job is being the Executive Director of the TU Delft Extension School for open and online education. This week I got a lot of remarks that these Coronavirus times are great opportunities for online education. I'm ambivalent about that. Creating high-quality online education takes time. Careful design and rigorous delivery are important for a good learning experience. Yesterday the Government decided that all Dutch universities should directly move all their education online and not offer any on-campus classes until the end of March.

Scale
Currently, the Extension School has about 150 courses and develops about 30 courses per year. We are in the third quarter of our academic year, this means we have to move at least 800 courses instantly online and April 20th the 4th quarter starts with another 500 courses. This scale means that our regular processes of creating and offering online courses will not work. We have to redesign our processes, expand our tools and support.

So the online education we offer in our Extension School is incomparable to the online education we are going to do in the next weeks. I prefer to call it remote teaching and learning, to clearly distinguish it from our regular online education.

Readiness of students
Our normal learners in our courses make the decision to do an online course. We inform them what to expect. Our campus students are used to classroom teaching, we should be aware that their readiness for online education might not be as high as we expect. It is important to address this in our courses.

Tools
I see a lot of teachers asking for new tools and edtech companies offering their platform for free. This might seem like a good idea, but please be aware of a couple of things:

• implementation of a new tool takes time. From checking GDPR-compliance to setting it up the right way.
• if every teacher starts to use their own tool, the student will get frustrated very quickly. Most of them are fulltime students, who are following multiple courses. If they have to figure out new tools for every course it takes a lot of effort.
• the university offers an extensive set of tools. These tools are integrated, documented and supported, that means if you encounter a problem there is someone to help you.

So for use your campus LMS and the tools that are available. Yes, this will limit you to what you can do, but it is good enough to offer remote teaching and learning.

Synchronous activities
Most of our education is based on synchronous activities in classrooms. This is something that has a lot of limitations online. My recommendation is to only do synchronous activities when absolutely necessary and your group is not to big. If your regular class is a traditional lecture for a large group, online video is probably not the best option. Powerpoint with voice, a discussion board for questions and online office hours might be a much better option in this situation.

Other educational activities
There are a lot of educational activities that are even harder to move online, such as lab work. Another big challenge is our exams. Most exams are still 3-hour written exams. We have the option for digital exams, even with remote proctoring, but most exams have to be redesigned to work as a digital exam and our infrastructure can't handle 26000 students.

Support
These are times that Teaching and Learning support staff can show their value. They are all doing their best within all the limitations to offer the best support for teachers and students. Make use of their expertise and involve them, you don't have figure everything out by yourself. And don't forget to be nice to them, send them hugs and chocolate.

Conclusion

Altogether, what we are currently offering online is remote teaching and learning and is not typical for online education we offer via the Extension School. It does offer an opportunity to continue to run the university as best as possible. Many things will fail, will be frustrating and will impact your life. Don't blame your teachers or university, they are really doing everything in their power to continue to offer your education.

Since January the Open Education Consortium has changed its name into Open Education Global. This new name better reflects our worldwide community and gives all activities a recognisable name:

• OEGlobal Conference: Where the world meets to discuss how opening education helps us achieve universal access, equity, innovation and opportunity in education.
• OEAwards for Excellence: Annual recognition to outstanding contributions in the Open Education community.
• OEWeek: Education Week has become one the most foremost global events recognizing high achievement and excellence in open education.

The staff has also completely rebranded all our logos and website. Take a look at oeglobal.org.

As I mentioned on this blog in December I'm moving on to a new position. This means that there is a vacancy for my old position as Manager Teaching & Learning Services. The job opening is available here: https://www.academictransfer.com/en/289745/manager-teaching-and-learning-services/

We are also hiring a new learning developer (in Dutch) and a UTQ Trainer (in Dutch). Want to know more about what the job of learning developer entails, read this blog post of learning developer Bea de los Arcos.

It is a great team with lots of enthousiasm, expertise and a strong drive to improve education. If you are interested, please apply before March 1st.

You will be involved in supporting all the education activities of the university: open education, blended education, online education, education for professionals and teacher training.

The Digital Credential Consortium has published an interesting white paper on building the digital credential infrastructure for the future. The Digital Credentials Consortium was founded by leading universities with expertise in the design of verifiable digital credentials. Together, we are designing an infrastructure for digital credentials of academic achievement. Founding members are Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), Georgia Institute of Technology (USA), Harvard University (USA), Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam (Germany), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), McMaster University (Canada), Tecnologico De Monterrey (Mexico), TU Munich (Germany), UC Berkeley (USA), UC Irvine (USA), University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy), University of Toronto (Canada).
The Delft Extension School is involved in this project, and I'm one of the participants and I reviewed this white paper.

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This week the Executive Board has appointed me as the new Executive Director of the Delft Extension School per the 1st of January 2020. I’m delighted with this appointment and looking forward to lead the Extension School into a new phase.

Strengthening the foundation of the Extension School

Part of my new role is the transition of the Extension School into a new phase. Together with professor Arno Smets I’m leading a project team to prepare a business and implementation plan for the Extension School. After six years of exponential growth and tremendous success in Open & Online Education for learners worldwide, the foundation of the original setup of the Extension School needs enhancement. In 2021 the Extension School will become a permanent institute of TU Delft to educate the world by offering high-quality online education.

Transition

Per January I will combine the new role with my existing role as Manager Teaching & Learning Services until March 1st. From March 1st I will be fulltime focused on my new role as Executive Director.