Granted TPM projects Open Education Stimulation Fund
To enable TU Delft staff to innovate their courses with open education, the Open Education Stimulation Fund 2022 granted eleven project proposals. In three of them TPM researchers are involved. These are:
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One of the barriers educators face is the unexpected additional time and effort to find the right resources and adapt the material to their needs, all the while there is an immense potential for open educational materials to contribute to curricula and assist educators with proven materials. "Cooking up OER" is a 5 min instructional video produced by a teacher that has already engaged in producing and re-using an OER, aiming to increase the usability of existing materials available at the 4TU OER platform. Involved TPM researchers: Camilo Andres Benitez-Avila and Nazli Yonca Aydin.
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With advances in computational infrastructures, data science (and AI more generally) has advanced, and in part replaced, several processes of engineering. Our engineers with data science knowledge now work in all sectors of society.
Education material is dominated by western perspectives and largely developed by able-bodied cis-gendered men, centring singular thinking in how we collect, clean, map, model, interpret and evaluate data, and share or cite evidence. Those who are represented get to shape futures for themselves (educated, urban, young adults), while the rest of the identities and issues are shifted to the margins of society. When colonial forms of education at scale are combined with nationally funded Artificial Intelligence programmes of research, it legitimises data extraction and unequal forms of participation in decision, labour, and society, further perpetuating damages to vulnerable communities. \To make space for alternate social realities, lived experiences, datasets, methodologies, map-building practices, and frameworks, we will develop a decolonising process for data science education. Our approach will combine non-western geographical knowledge, transdisciplinarity, community participation, and intersectional and reflexive thinking to deliver an open, interactive, and co-created textbook for data science education at engineering universities. Involved TPM researchers: Trivik Verma and Juliana Goncalves.
Trivik Verma will lead the project and be supported by Juliana Goncalves. They also are seeking community support and collaborations across all Dutch Universities. Feel free to reach out to them.
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The Open Education project “From theory to application: learning to optimize with Operations Research in an interactive way” focuses on increasing students’ understanding of and engagement with Operations Research (OR). Even though OR is quite an intuitive approach to problems, its rigorous models are challenging for students due to their high level of abstraction, especially in fast-paced courses.
Education-related literature highlights that a difficult aspect of teaching OR is fostering enthusiasm for developing optimization models. We plan to increase such enthusiasm level in a three-fold manner. First, by developing an open textbook on OR models. Second, by providing open source coded examples and visualizations that refer back to the book. Third, by designing board games mimicking the same models that can be played for experimentation. With such a comprehensive educational tool, students can learn OR with a multi-faceted, engaging, and fun approach. Involved TPM researcher: Stefano Fazi.