At the Forefront of Open Education

Textbook frustrations

It was his own teaching experience that first opened Michiel’s eyes to the need for a different sort of educational materials. As a lecturer at the Hogeschool Utrecht, he was educating people to become high school chemistry teachers. “I kept running into the fact that the materials I was using to teach were not working for me,” he says. “I got very frustrated because I needed to teach using textbooks that were either outdated or there were three different editions of it in circulation.” In practice, that created a lot of confusion, and instead of helping him, Michiel felt like the materials prevented him from teaching good classes.

When he started working at TU Delft on the education support team in 2017, the theme of Open Education was taking shape. Although he had already been publishing through OpenCourseWare for some time, there was a push to start creating different types of open educational resources. Specifically, the idea of open textbooks emerged, a way for people to create, but also build on one another’s work, adapting materials to their own teaching context. “That immediately tickled me in the sense that this is exactly what I would have wanted when I was teaching, this kind of approach that really facilitates teaching,” he said. “That's really what got me into the whole theme.”

Digital and reusable

Although people are used to thinking about textbooks in a classical sense, Michiel says that digitalisation is making a lot of things possible. When it comes to translating physical books to a digital space, the most common way to do that has been to create a PDF. But with digitalisation, he says it’s important to think about how we interact with the world around us, including educational materials. “For example, if you look at electric cars right now, most of the makers think about how they can make a good car with nice electronics integrated in it,” says Michiel. “But Tesla really thinks about how they can create a great computer that drives, and that is the kind of thinking that we also need to do when it comes to educational materials.” This gave life to the open interactive textbook project, which is about creating something that others can take, build on, redesign, and even create from it something completely new, all with a focus on reusability and knowledge dissemination.

New way of thinking

Although he was always convinced that there would a point when people would start thinking differently about open textbooks, Michiel says it has taken a lot of lobbying and convincing. “I think I've managed to get people to start thinking about how we can stretch the definition of what a book is,” he says. “What I'm most proud of is that I've been able change people's ways of thinking on what a useful and reusable piece of educational literature needs to do or needs to be like.” Michiel says there is now a group of teachers that wants to create something for the wider community, so that everyone can build upon it and that feels rewarding. “I've always been adamant that we just need to be patient, that we just need to keep going and we will prove the value of this eventually,” he says. “I think we've done it; I think it's there now and it's only going to get better in the future.”

But the more he dug into things, the more Michiel recognised that it was not just about textbooks or resources. “It's also about a way of working, a way of thinking about education,” he said. “I had a realisation that this is a different culture, fundamentally thinking about how you teach in a good way, an inclusive way, and in a way that everything you use to teach facilitates you instead of you facilitating some commercial third party.” Since becoming Open Education Coordinator at the TU Delft Library in March of 2021, Michiel has been advocating for a culture of publishing and sharing open educational resources.

Taking ownership

Working in an open environment and making sure that things are available and reusable by others is only as effective as how many people actually reuse the materials, explains Michiel. Enabling that is a matter of asking the right questions and being facilitators of the process of education, he says. When it comes to important themes and developments in education like digitalisation, it’s about helping the people that are responsible for it to do it in a proper way. “As an institution, we want to be the ones that are responsible for how we teach,” says Michiel. “But if we don’t take ownership, commercial parties will step in and offer commercial products and then we're dependent on what they supply for doing our teaching and we're essentially not an independent knowledge institution anymore.”

There are some things that put TU Delft at the forefront of the open education movement, according to Michiel. The TU Delft OpenCourseWare platform provides free and open educational resources of high-quality university‐level courses. And the Extension School for Continuing Education offers courses and short programmes that support lifelong learners and professionals with continuing education. And now the TU Delft also offers a catalogue of 40 open textbooks that is still growing every month. “This is something that is quite unprecedented, at least in the Netherlands and I think only surpassed by MIT,” he said. “I really feel that the TU Delft has always been at the forefront of this, leading the way, and will continue to do so in the future, even after I’m long gone. I’m proud to leave behind something that is not dependent on me anymore.”