Four grants awarded to IDE projects by Open Education Stimulation Fund
The Open Education Stimulation Fund (OESF) 2023 has awarded grants to four project proposals by IDE educators and researchers. A total of 13 TU Delft proposals have received the grant. The OESF encourages TU Delft staff to innovate their teaching with open educational resources and practices. Find out more about each of the projects below.
Cultivating Resilience in TU Delft Learning Environments
Team
- Rebecca Price, Assistant Professor (IDE)
- Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, Associate Professor (IDE)
- Katie Barry, Educational Psychologist (UTQ trainer) (TLS)
- Daniella Maiullari, Assistant Professor (BK)
How do we cultivate resilience so that TU Delft students become alumni, continuously create solutions for society - but not to the detriment of their own well-being?
At TU Delft, we proudly provide education to thousands of engineers, designers, architects, policy makers and more, all under the banner of “impact for a better society”. Key to our technical legacy, culture and pedagogical approach is emphasising methods, tools, technology, theories that can be applied to solve problems. This places the student as the solver of problems – and technology as a key enabler.
Yet, just how resilient are students in their problem solving process? Changing the world requires them to first challenge the status quo – a process that opens them up to critique and potential hostility.
Developing educational materials supporting autonomous learning using productive failure didactics
Team
- Bas Flipsen, Associate Professor (IDE)
- Stefan Persaud, Senior Teacher (IDE)
- Willemijn Elkhuizen, Assistant professor (IDE)
- Sepideh Ghorat, Assistant Professor (IDE)
- Ernest van Breemen (IDE)
With the introduction of the new IDE bachelor in 2021 all courses underwent a revision to promote, amongst other, an autonomous learning attitude. The conventional approach of teaching engineering relied on direct instructions and problem-based learning and proved to be inadequate, as students struggled to apply their engineering knowledge in capstone design projects.
To align with autonomous learning and to increase the application of engineering in capstone design projects, “productive failure” was introduced as a new didactical approach within our first-year course, Understanding Product Engineering (IOB1-2). Productive failure flips the traditional learning process and starts with an explorative problem which students cannot solve followed by an instruction explaining the missing concept. The approach engages students in active problem-solving, with the goal to increase the retention time of the theoretical concepts.
Illuminating the Energy Transition
Team
- Milos Cvetkovic, Assistant Professor (EEMCS)
- Aihui Fu, Postdoc (EEMCS)
- Peter Palensky, Professor (EEMCS)
- Abhigyan Singh, Assistant Professor (IDE)
- Natalia Romero, Associate Professor (IDE)
Our accepted project, "Enhancing Electrical Engineering Education," responds to challenges within TU Delft's BSc Electrical Engineering (EE) program. Emphasizing collaborative hands-on projects, the curriculum's four Integrated Projects (IPs) aim to deepen students' understanding and critical thinking. However, limitations in lab space, staff availability, and traditional settings pose obstacles for optimal student engagement, especially for those with unique learning needs.
Innovatively addressing these challenges, our project proposes the development of a digital twin – a simulator replicating physical lab hardware within an interactive Jupyter textbook. This solution provides students with a supplementary learning tool to refine algorithms and programs, offering performance scores and feedback. Subsequently, students can implement refined algorithms in the physical lab, saving time and ensuring scalability.
TU Delft Health-Impacter: open education for more awareness and effective scalable education about healthcare entrepreneurship
Team
- Pieter Vandekerckhove, Assistant Professor, (TPM)
- Frido Smulders, Full Professor (IDE)
- Sam Harris, SmashMedicine, Director
To respond to complex healthcare challenges, universities need to be more entrepreneurial with open education about healthcare entrepreneurship. Delft Centre for Entrepreneurship (DCE) aims to help students to make an impact with new health solutions in a sustainable way within a multidisciplinary context. We want to develop open education resources consisting of panel discussions and crowdsourced questions and answers with support from the award-winning SmashMedicine platform.
In addition, we want to provide more material to students and coaches to go through the project learning process more effectively. We want to teach students how to deal with multi-disciplinary challenges in their projects and we want to teach coaches how to manage this multi-disciplinary process. Ultimately, we hope to start building a library of OER about healthcare innovation like the established healthcare entrepreneurship program called Biodesign from Stanford University.