Online education is booming
Following the example of Harvard University, in 2014 TU Delft set up its Extension School. This is where all open and online education is offered to the whole world. Vice-president for Education Rob Mudde and his team explore how they can offer entire online programmes to professionals.
IIn the last few years, around 2.5 million people from all over the world have registered for one of our massive open online courses (MOOCs), of which there are more than 100, that we offer through the EdX platform. Most international students know us through these online courses. Last year, we were awarded the title of ‘world leader in innovative engineering education’ as part of a MIT benchmark study. Online education has given a real boost to our international reputation. It also had a positive impact on campus-based teaching. A lot of online material is reused for blended learning, where students do the preparatory work online so that there is more time for deepening and discussion during the lectures.”
Entire degree programmes offered online
“In the meantime, the larger institutions that instigated the online movement – such as MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and TU Delft – are exploring which steps to take next. Georgia Tech, for example, offers an online version of their IT programme, which has more than 8,500 students. They pay $6,700, while the campus-based version costs more than $45,000. This means that large-scale, high-quality and affordable online education is now being offered on the market by institutions with an international reputation. We are in an excellent position to explore whether we want to participate in that by offering entire degree programmes online in certain topic areas. Our target group for this is older people already in work: professionals over thirty, who want to study part-time to give their career a boost or to head in a different direction.”
Retraining
“This is also a huge theme at a political level, both in the Nether-lands and abroad. Robotisation, large-scale 3D printing, the Internet of Things: the fourth industrial revolution will radically change the economy. Many people will have to retrain in the coming decades. We certainly see this as a task for our university, but it remains to be seen which part of that problem we can solve. Of course, we want to do this in a way that strengthens our current education and research, rather than just increasing the workload. Here too, the example of Georgia Tech is particularly useful. There, they recruited 100 PhD students and postdocs to spend one day a week supervising students as online tutors; the rest of the time, they can be used for research.”
Investment needed
“It’s likely that only a handful of institutions will provide a large-scale online programme range. So we must learn to understand exactly how this market works: How will demand develop? Who is the target group? Where is the competition? Another challenge is that good online education requires a lot of pre-investment. The development of an entire online degree programme alone costs a few million euros and a lot of time. So you don’t want to choose a theme that other institutions have already started on.”
Collaborating with alumni and industry
“We would prefer to work on this in consultation with other parties, such as alumni or market players. All kinds of sectors will have to change their infrastructures and their services. As such, lots of people will need to acquire new skills. If you develop the degree programmes in collaboration with the industry, the degrees will be better suited to the needs of the employees who will have to go through the transition.”
Shorter and more flexible programmes
“That will involve a considerable transition process. We currently have a lot of experience in training young students who are studying an academic discipline for the first time and in preparing them for a job as an engineer. This new development will focus on people who are already much further in their careers. They have other commitments and can’t just take two years off to go and study. Such degree programmes will, therefore, have to be shorter. At the same time, they already have a basis, so the programmes will also have to be far more flexible. Sometimes participants will be able to spend more time studying, sometimes less. You can issue ‘stackable ‘certificates for the completed modules, that together ultimately lead to a degree certificate.”
Global impact
“This is a really interesting development in the world of education. As in other industries, digitisation raises fundamental questions about what we should continue doing in the traditional way. I think that campus-based education is extremely valuable and will continue, but you also see something new emerging that will also be big. I would like to explore how we can offer the best of both worlds and thus make education even more accessible to those who do not have access to it now. That’s what I liked about the initial programme: sharing knowledge with the whole world. We must now look for new business models so that we can continue to do this sustainably. This will enable us to have an impact on people and societies all over the world, by helping them keep up with all these new developments.”