Stories of Five TU Delft Education Teams #3 The story of the PUCH MOOC Team

The idea behind the PUCH MOOC  

One of the challenges that consistently reappears at TU Delft is that BSc students of engineering programmes drop-out for two undesirable reasons. Namely, because students either find it difficult to deal with the transition from high school to university level, or because they find out too late that the programme is different from what they expected it would be. This too goes for TU Delft BSc Chemistry students. Which is why the AS faculty management decided in 2022 that it was time for a Pre-University Chemistry MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course. The main goal of the MOOC would be to help high-school students in the transition to university-level chemistry, by offering them material that both prepares them for an academic study related to chemistry and that enables them to make a better informed study choice.

The creation of the team 

Of course, anyone who has ever helped design a MOOC knows that such a project comes with an equally massive amount of work. This is why, when the decision was made for the creation of the PUCH MOOC, a team was formed gradually by those who felt a strong connection to the project and were thus intrinsically motivated to work on it. To give but one example, Cees Breevaart, who initially joined the team as a Teaching Assistant, tells us: “When Robin told me that the team was looking for TA’s, I immediately got excited about the project and agreed to join the team. I already had some experience teaching chemistry in high-school and what stood out to me at TU Delft was that university teachers sometimes seemed to forget what actually happens at high-schools and how chemistry is taught there. Of course, it’s difficult to keep up, also because this changes every few years, but I felt really motivated to share my insights with the team and help develop material for the course.” There is a high level of diversity in the team when it comes to everyone’s backgrounds. The team brings together the perspective of university teachers, high school teachers, educational and blended learning specialists as well as university students. 

Time management and the importance of the project manager 

Working in a team which includes members from all over the faculty means that everyone works in and from different places. Additionally, team members had to find a way to combine work for the MOOC with their own teaching, learning and/ or researching responsibilities. One of the most difficult challenges for the team was how to make sure that everyone knew what was expected of them in order to develop material in time and meet deadlines. As Robin and Cees emphasize, Cristiano, the former project manager of the PUCH MOOC, played a key role in this. As Robin explains: “Cristiano always knew where everyone was in the project, where we were going and what was required of us. At all times, this was clear to everyone. I really did not have the time to keep the bigger picture in mind when working on the project and I think this was the case for most of us. I think without Cristiano, everything would have fallen apart, for sure”.  

Success factors 

In addition to the central role of the project manager and the clear communication within the team, other factors that contributed to the success of the team were the team’s diversity, everyone’s dedication to and enthusiasm for the project, but also the flexibility within the team to deal with unforeseen events. As Cees shares: “For me it was really just a lot of fun to work on this project. As a high-school chemistry teacher, it is really nice to work on something that I know will be useful to my students. We can look at it together, knowing that it will prepare them for something they will begin with in university. I think this really motivated me to put in the extra effort.” To this Cristiano adds that sometimes there would be moments or periods where everything seemed to align and would come together: “One moment was when we started recording for the MOOC. We’d be in these meetings where everyone would shoot ideas, tack-tack-tack, just like that. As for me, I got a lot of energy from moments like that and it motivated me to keep up the work and do my best to create more of these kinds of moments with the team”.  

Lessons Learnt for TU Delft 

One of the key takeaways of the experiences and journey of the PUCH MOOC Team is the importance of finding a way to fit initiatives like the PUCH MOOC into an already packed, existing schedule. Especially if you have a lot of teaching responsibilities, because course preparations and teaching lectures and seminars do not allow for a lot of flexibility. When from a faculty perspective, the decision is made for a project like the PUCH MOOC, it might help to take into consideration the team members’ teaching workload as distributed over the quarters of the year, and plan project work accordingly.  

The Education Team Award and the … nomination for the Dutch Education Award! 

As a matter of fact, the PUCH MOOC Team won the Education Team Award 2023, as a token of TU Delft’s appreciation and recognition of outstanding teamwork to the improvement of the university’s engineering education. However, this is not all. Last year, the PUCH MOOC team joined forces with the TU Delft Physics and Maths MOOC Teams and together they were nominated by the TU Delft for the Dutch Education Award (Nederlandse Onderwijspremie).^[4] The latter is the highest distinction awarded in Dutch secondary vocational education, higher professional education and university education in acknowledgement of, and as an incentive for, educational innovation in MBO, HBO and WO. We’d like to congratulate the TU Delft MOOC Teams on making it to the semi-finals! The team is motivated to further develop their programs together and take it to the next level.  

[1] Want to know more about ART? Read the story of ART here.

[2] Want to know more about MUDE? Read the story of MUDE here. 

[3] The article referred to here is “The Strength of TU Delft Education Teams”. Interested in the article? You can find it here.

[4] If you want to read more about the Nederlandse Onderwijspremie, see here.