Innovation
- Facilitate research to improve our continuing and campus education
- Act as innovation hub for education
"The Extension School aims to be a strong innovator. This means that we try out new things and learn from these to continuously improve our activities, processes, tools, products, and services to benefit our learners and the educational community."
"To become that strong innovator, we set a number of things in motion, such as delving into and applying Design Thinking principles, tools, and techniques to our innovation projects. To spark ideas and create free space to experiment, we also mapped out a process for bottom-up innovations that facilitates coming up with new proposals. I am also proud that the Extension School continues to be an attractive cooperation partner within consortia both in terms of winning external grants and for carrying out novel, impactful education projects. Some of these focussed on new digital educational formats and credentials, and on the creation of educational training communities and networks to support future employability in important sectors like the energy transition.”
Sofia Dopper – Manager Education Support
Learner Credential Wallet
We are a founding member of the Digital Credentials Consortium of 12 leading universities that collaborate on the exchange of digital data and the use of blockchain to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that will become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials, digitally.
This year, efforts focussed on researching the use of digital pathways and on launching the open-source Learner Credential Wallet app (for both iOS and Android) to store digital credentials. Collaborative work continues to release a web-verifier application whereby academic institutions and potential employers can check credentials' validity. Due to the high level of interest and the number of requests received by many institutions, the Consortium is reviewing its membership strategy to allow for an expansion in the coming year.
Microcredentials
We represent TU Delft in the Dutch national pilot to share knowledge and set up a framework to issue Microcredentials in the Netherlands. In December, we issued the first Microcredentials and associated digital Edubadges for three Online Academic Courses by the faculty of Aerospace Engineering. Results from a learner survey deployed about the added value of Microcredentials are expected in early 2023.
ERASMUS projects
The Extension School takes part in innovation projects under various Erasmus initiatives. Below two notable ones:
SuperRED: it stands for Supporting Self-Regulated Learning in Digital and Remote Education and it aims to increase the overall quality of the education system and offer co-designed methodologies and tools adaptable to local contexts.
RAPIDE: it stands for Relevant Assessment and Pedagogies for Inclusive Digital Education and aims to co-create, implement, and share innovative pedagogies and aligned assessments for relevant and inclusive digital education.
Using Social Network Analysis to explore Learning networks in MOOCs discussion forums
Data from three of our MOOCs was used in this paper published by Ali Soleymani et. al. By analyzing the interaction of learners in discussion forum on course platforms, he investigates social learning in professional learning networks. The study highlights how this novel learning approach is able to connect young professionals and experienced practitioners digitally, and can promote professional development and innovation. Read the paper.
Ali Soleymani is a PhD student within the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Education and Learning (LDE CEL) and involved in the NWO-funded TransAct project.
Research agreement with Monash University
We signed a collaboration contract for the project Evaluating predictive models of student success: lessons learned from student retention.
Data from two of our MOOCs was sent to the team directed by Dr Guanliang Chen, who will elaborate relevant statistical analysis within the scope of the project.
The Australian university houses a well-known centre for learning analytics that is regarded as world-leading in its field. Increased access to both data and results additionally supports a common vision for open education.
Research agreement with Leiden University
A similar collaboration contract was agreed with Leiden University. Data from one of our MOOCs was sent to Xiaomei Wei's group, as part of the project Would you be an active learner in MOOC discussion forums? The interplay of motivation, cognitive engagement, and social interaction.
100 DAYS OF... Data for Learning
We participated in this joint initiative by the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Education and Learning (CEL-LDE) to collaboratively explore - with lecturers, students, and researchers - the use of data in engineering education through a series of events and interactive sessions, resulting in new projects and innovative perspectives.
4-day course production bootcamp
Designing and producing an online course usually takes nine months to a year, with the added difficulty of finding dedicated time in the very busy schedules of subject matter experts (professors, teaching staff). To speed up the process, we applied a bootcamp approach to test how much of a course design could be achieved in a very short, concentrated span of time.
A team led by Carola Hein from the faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment, with Extension School education support, worked off-site for four days to completely focus on the task. Although the approach did not necessarily lead to a shorter course production time, it delivered a fully-fledged course storyboard, including initial designs for the modules and content, draft scripts, and requirements and descriptions of materials.
The resulting course Water Values: Leveraging the Past for Sustainable Water Systems will be officially launched at the UNESCO Water Conference in New York in March 2023.
Following this experience, the bootcamp approach has been adapted to develop blended courses for campus.
Tableau dashboards
As an accountable and transparent organisation, we work to improve how we collect, use, and share information for reporting purposes and the accessibility and quality of that information.
To this end, we created new dashboards using the Tableau management information system where data from our online courses can be viewed and filtered according to specific parameters. Ad-hoc access can also be provided upon request.
Extension School for Continuing Education
Image credits (CC-BY): Osman Rana on Unsplash, Rahul Chakraborty on Unsplash, Geraldine Lewa on Unsplash, Safar Safarov on Unsplash, Pixabay on Pexels