It has been a busy travel year: 12 trips, 8 countries, 20 flights and 92 nights away from home. As many of you know I like the travelling to comes with my current job. In most cases I have the opportunity to stay a couple of days longer to explore the city or country. Here is the list of trips:
Jan: day trip to Brussels
Feb: visit to Airbus in Toulouse and Marseille
March/April: conference in Sausalito (next to Golden Gate Bridge) and extra time to do a roadtrip around California (San Franscisco, Napa Valley, Yosemite NP, Kings Canyon, Sequia NP, Death Valley, Santa Barbara, HW 1 up to Monterey)
April/May: Conference in Banff and a roadtrip around Alberta (Banff NP, Jasper NP, Edmonton, Drumheller, Calgary)
June: Conference in Barcelona, only one afternoon to explore the city
Sept/October: Conference in Sun City, South Africa. Added 2,5 weeks to explore South Africa (Johannesburg/Pretoria, Entabeni Game Reserve, Capetown, Krugerpark, Sun City)
November: Conference in Vancouver. Added a couple of extra days to visit Whistler and Vancouver Island.
Nov/Dec: Conference in Rome, added 2 days to visit Rome and Vatican City (first time for me in Rome)
This week I'm attending the annual conference of EDEN: European Distance and E-leearning Network. TU Delft has recently joined the network of more than 200 institutional members and more than 1200 members in the Network of Academics and Professionals (NAP).
This years conference will be in Barcelona and is hosted by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The conference has some interesting keynotes speakers. Some of the speakers I'm looking forward too:
Xavier Prats Monné DG for Education and Culture of the European Commission. It is always good to hear the priorities of the EC.
Jim Groom Recently resigned his job at the University of Mary Washington to continue his work on Reclaim Hosting.
Audrey Watters the best EdTech journalist and interesting voice in the field op open education.
Stavros Panagiotis Xanthopoylos Vice-President ABED and my fellow board member at the Open Education Consortium.
Presentations of TU Delft
Off course we are not just consuming, but we are presenting too. Together with my collegaes Nelson Jorge and Sofia Dopper we have written a paper about defining a pedagogical model: the TU Delft Online Learning Experience. We will present this on Thursday morning in session D5 (room Salon 4) at 11.30-13.00.
On Wednesday the MOOCs4all project, in which we are participating is organising a workshop about low-cost production of moocs. Janine Kiers is organising this workshop with the others of the project. This session C3 is Wednesday afternoon at 16.30-18.00 in Salon 5.
Live Stream
If you can't attend the conference, it is possible to view the plenary sessions via the EDEN youtube channel. And there will be some tweeting with the hashtag #EDEN15.
Just like last year, a selection of papers of the Open Education Global Conference are published in the ICDE Journal Open Praxis. Open Praxis is a peer-reviewed open access scholarly journal focusing on research and innovation in open, distance and flexible education. Open Praxis is published by ICDE and is under the editorship of Dr. Inés Gil-Jaurena at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain.
According to the editors the selected papers presented in this issue are a good example of some trends they currently find in the field of open education:
The increasing number of research and showcases with a focus on openness, providing a rigorous basis for getting recommendations, lessons learned, highlights.
The relevance of open educational practices, a step beyond open educational resources and open courses.
The core position of open education within the transformation of higher education, and the relevance of institutional strategies which include "open" to do so.
Yesterday it was my turn to do an action lab on MOOCs. The subtitle was "everything you want to know about MOOCs". For my it was also a good activity to get all our activities together. And it is impressive!
We have 16 MOOCs finished, 4 are running (you can still enrol), 5 new and 7 reruns are in production. So we can say that we have some experience with making MOOCs. We also have more than 400,000 enrolments.
I started the action lab with a short presentation about the TU Delft MOOC activities. The presentation is below. After the slide 21 I had some spare slide I could use to answer questions.
Journey
After the presentation I opened it for questions and used our MOOC Development journey to answer questions. I also had the poster of the learning experience flow of our award winning MOOC Delft Design Approach up on the wall. They used this to design their MOOC. They start with the template and use the cards to organise it week by week. All the documents are attached at the bottom of this post.
Sublicensing MOOCs
One of the questions I got was about the sublicensing of MOOCs. My colleague Martijn Ouwehand did a presentation about this subject on Wednesday. His slides are below.
Yesterday we received three awards at the yearly Open Education Award Ceremony. With these three awards our total comes to 10 awards in the last 4 years. It always is great honour to receive external recognition for the activities of our professors and support staff. It strengthen our mission for open education at TU Delft.
OpenMOOCs
Martijn receives award for the mooc Solving Complex Problems
Solving Complex Problems, by Alexander de Haan, is about Complex Multi Actor Systems, ‘spaghetti situations’ in which everything appears to be interlinked and many factors influence each other. Consider, for example, a situation in which new energy technology is introduced into an existing energy market. In such situations, people often talk about solutions, but nobody is exactly sure what the question is, or the best solution. Quantitative and qualitative models can help people understand such complex issues. Course participants will acquire practical tools and methods with which to structure and analyse complex problems.
José Hekkens receives award for the mooc Delft Design Approach
Delft Design Approach, by Jaap Daalhuizen, has also received an Award of Excellence in the ‘Open MOOC’ category. The Delft Design Approach is a structured approach that helps designers cope with complex design projects – from the formulation of a strategic vision and mapping users and their contexts to developing and selecting meaningful designs for products and services. TU Delft hopes that this MOOC will introduce participants to its own unique approach to design, using several models and design methods, and drawing upon the knowledge and experience of experts from both education and practice. The online course allows participants to compare their results with those of students studying on campus at Delft and designers from the profession.
OpenCourseWare
Martijn receives award for Human Controller course
The Human Controller, by David Abbink, is a course in the Mechanical Engineering Master’s degree programme. The course material (video lectures, exercises, articles, exam questions, etc.) is freely available as OpenCourseWare (OCW) on the internet. The Open Education Consortium has awarded the course as an ‘Outstanding (OCW) Course’. The course studies man’s abilities and limits with regard to controlling machines. Various human sensors are explained, and participants learn how muscles work and how movement is coordinated. Man’s ability to control is explained within the context of control technology – a tricky subject that is made somewhat easier by considering examples from the practical situation. Two of the course assignments involve students doing their own experiments to demonstrate that the theory also applies to them. In one of these projects, the students download software that requires them to follow a moving dot with their mouse. This game allows the students to experience just how difficult it can be to control different types of systems, and teaches them how to measure their own control behaviour and construct mathematical models.
This week I'm in the beautiful town of Banff in the state of Alberta (Canada) for the Open Education Global Conference 2015. This is the yearly conference organised by the Open Education Consortium. As board member I have to be present at this conference, but that is never a burden.
It always is a busy conference for me. Next to the conference we also have the board meeting of the consortium. This year Meena also tricked me in some workshops. So you have multiple opportunities to see me in action.
Pre-conference workshop On Tuesday we start with a pre-conference workshop on getting started with Open Education. Together with Robert Schuwer, Martijn Ouwehand, Jure Cuhalev and Meena Whang I will organise a full day workshop. This conference will be based on the workshop we organised last year as part of the OpenCourseWare Europe project.
Action Lab MOOCs On Friday I'm organising an 'Action Lab' about everything you want to know about MOOCs. In this one hour session I will try to answer all the questions the participants have on the production and delivery of MOOCs.
Awards This year the TU Delft has won three awards:
The project manager of the Design mooc is here at the conference, so she will pick up this award. The other two Martijn and I will pick up on behalf of David and Alexander.
Last week I hosted a little conference at Delft University of Technology. For the first time, the EdX Conference was hosted outside the Boston Area. It was hosted in the beautiful building of our library. It was quite some work to organise it, but it was a great success according to all participants.
It is always exciting to see that the plan you set out works out even better then expected. Thanks to my great team of TU Delft Event Solutions (Anneke, Ginny, Natascha and Marie Louise), thanks to all the speakers of the parallel sessions, thanks to George Siemens for delivering a thought-provoking keynote and off course thanks to all the people who participated in the discussions.
MOOCs have gone from a distant idea to a global phenomenon in less than five years. During this period MOOCs have innovated at a dazzling speed in content creation, delivery, feedback, testing and other aspects of the knowledge delivery process. The excitement of MOOCs has been the promise of learning at scale. As a result, the primary focus of the design of MOOCs to date has been on “scale”. We believe it is now time to focus our attention on the design for learning.
This workshop plans to bring together the educators, technologists, researchers, learning scientists, entrepreneurs, and funders of MOOCs to share their innovations, discuss the impact on education and to answer questions such as: How to best support students to learn in an online environment? How can MOOCs be successfully integrated with the traditional classroom experience? For which students and in what contexts are these courses most effective? What can we learn from the rich data streams generated by these platforms? How do we structure the learning activities to produce data streams that better support research?
Topics include, but are not restricted to:
Creating and teaching with MOOCs
Open content /open licensing and MOOCs
Novel pedagogical processes with MOOCs
Tools for collaboration, feedback, testing and content delivery
Best practices in MOOCs
Learning from experiments with MOOCs (including both successes and failures)
Metrics of success for learners and instructors of MOOCs
On campus use of MOOCs
Evaluation of MOOCs
Learning analytics and MOOCs
Interactive activities in MOOCs
Challenges facing MOOCs
Expanding the learner community with MOOCs
Learning research based on MOOCs
Key research challenges
We invite practitioners interested in coming together to discuss these issues to submit a one page description of work they have done in a MOOC including something interesting that they have learned through their work that they believe would be valuable to share with others and/or a question or challenges that they confronted that they would like to have others discuss.
Key Dates:
Monday, March 31, 2014: Submission deadline (midnight, PST)
The theme of the 2014 Conference of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is "Open Education for a Multicultural World". The conference will explore the international dimensions of open education, its diverse projects, new research, policy dimensions and impacts on teaching and learning.
The conference will take place in scenic Ljubljana, Slovenia from 23-25 April 2014. Early registration has started today.
This one-day interactive workshop will introduce you to principles, tools and techniques that will allow you to get started with open education at your institution or organization. Participants will gain practical knowledge of the benefits and potential pitfalls in starting projects, convincing faculty and administrators, and integrating open education into institutional practice through examples from institutions around the world.
Aanstaande dinsdag en woensdag zijn de onderwijsdagen. Dit jaar is dinsdag gericht op het hoger onderwijs en woensdag op po, vo en mbo. Recent ging ik het programma bekijken en zag ik dat de TU Delft wel erg goed vertegenwoordigd bij de sessies. Totaal zijn er 9 sessies waarbij de TU Delft een van de sprekers levert. Dat is voor mij niet verbazend, want wij doen op dit moment veel leuke dingen, waar we graag over vertellen. Hier dus de lijst met Delftse sessies. Helaas staan er een heel aantal parallel geprogrammeerd, dus je kan ze niet allemaal volgen.
10.00
Keynote
Claire Boonstra (TU Delft alumnus)
11.15
Sessieronde 1:
Inspiratiesessie van een jonge ondernemer: Een frisse studentenblik op de kansen van technologie in het hoger onderwijs TU Delft start-up Ewoud de Kok (FeedbackFruits)
12.15
Sessieronde 2:
Next Generation Classroom: onderwijszalen voor de toekomst Marij Veugelers (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Piet van der Zanden (TU Delft)
Trends en ontwikkelingen in toetsing van open education Sofia Dopper (TU Delft)
OER en studiesucces: hoe kunt u open online onderwijs inzetten ter bevordering van studiesucces? Martijn Ouwehand (TU Delft)
14.00
Sessieronde 3:
Personal storage: Easy yet secure? Hans Nouwens (TU Delft), Michel Vierboom (bprc) in samenwerking met Surfmarket
MOOC’s: ervaringen en leerpunten Marja Verstelle (Universiteit Leiden), Frank Benneker (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Fred de Vries (Open Universiteit), Willem van Valkenburg (TU Delft), Robert Schuwer (Open Universiteit)
15.05
Sessieronde 4:
FEATURED SESSIE: Open en online onderwijs en de toekomst van het Nederlandse hoger onderwijs Timo Kos (TU Delft)
Grote zalen voor digitaal toetsen: waarom, hoe en wat levert het op? Meta Keijzer - de Ruijter (TU Delft)
Yesterday it was my turn to do an action lab on MOOCs. The subtitle was "everything you want to know about MOOCs". For my it was also a good activity to get all our activities together. And it is impressive!
