Sharing PRIME educational tools improves mathematics for engineering students

With more than 300 videos, applets and interactive videos spread across multiple platforms, PRIME – the Programme of Innovation in Mathematics Education at TU Delft – needed a better way to organise and share their learning resources. Programme Manager Tom Vroegrijk and Coordinator Beryl van Gelderen spearheaded a project to make their materials easier to find and more accessible, supporting lecturers and improving mathematics education for engineering students at TU Delft and beyond.

A collection to be shared

Well before this project, mathematics lecturer Vroegrijk notes that PRIME had an open education focus. “Our idea is that lecture materials should be shared openly as much as possible,” he says. The team that includes more than 30 lecturers, 4 coordinators, and a lot of student assistants works to design, improve, and organise 45 mathematics courses for interfaculty education.

Over the last couple of years, master’s student van Gelderen said the group made a lot of educational content but there wasn’t a clear overview or consolidated collection. “The content is out there, but it’s hard to find,” she says. With much of their work focused on creating content, Vroegrijk says they had not done a lot of outreach or officially shared their materials. They needed a way for lecturers to link to the material, making it easier for students to find and use.

Team effort leads to open

The project itself was a collaboration between lecturers and students, each contributing their own expertise. Much of the programming was done by Computer Science student assistants, and Vroegrijk notes that they often came up with their own ideas, including an interactive graph that shows how a course is structured. There was also a huge effort to catalogue class materials, select the right content, and in some cases make better versions of older materials. The team ultimately created the PRIME Catalogue website, with hundreds of high-quality mathematics course videos that can be easily filtered to find specific content. “When we show all of these materials to people, both inside and outside of TU Delft, they are amazed at what we have been able to do because it’s quite unique,” says Vroegrijk. “Those kinds of reactions are really nice.”

In the end, the team chose to publish their content with CC BY, the broadest, most open type of licence. But it takes more than that, says van Gelderen. “We have always tried to publish everything openly and maybe even more so now, but sometimes we forget that just sharing it is not enough. You also have to make it findable and easily accessible.”

Expert advice and support

It was the support of the people at the TU Delft Library that enabled the PRIME team to put their ideas into action. “Michiel de Jong knows a lot about education and publishing standards for open education so that was really helpful,” says van Gelderen. “They gave us a lot of attention, checking up on us and helped a lot with dissemination.” Vroegrijk agrees, saying, “The money helped, but it was not the most important part. The expertise, the following up, the sparring partner to talk about everything, that was really the most valuable thing.”