Lifelong learning and continuing education have many faces and objectives. Our key focus is delivering expert knowledge and applicable skills for professionals in the fields of science, design, and engineering.
Our courses and programs help learners at various stages of their professional life. We help them stay on top of their game, whether they are looking to change career, broaden their skillset, or acquire further academic qualifications. Our offering comes in a range of flexible formats. To contribute to the UN sustainable development goals, our portfolio comprises themes of key importance in today’s world, reflecting the need to equip people to find solutions to some of society’s big challenges.
Supporting careers
Our aim is to prepare many, such as high school students, the next generation of researchers and people in various stages of their professional life, for their next step. Our courses also help them to get familiar with an engineering approach and attitude, for example with project management in large engineering projects and with applying essential leadership skills specifically for engineers.
Learner-specific education
Massive open online courses to educate the world
TU Delft offers many MOOCs, also combined in short programs, in a variety of topics. These are open for unlimited participation to interested learners all over the world. In addition to OCW resources, such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs offer a full learning experience including personal interactions, assignments, quick quizzes, feedback and assessments. Our highly interactive courses have forums or social media discussions to support community and connections among students, professors, and teaching moderators. Since the courses are designed for large groups of learners, they offer knowledge and skills that are interesting and needed by many.
Working for a regional energy agency that promotes e-mobility, the e-cars program helped me to urgently improve my knowledge in this field. It offered an interesting and high-quality syllabus, so I decided to enrol. The learning environment is excellent, and the expert lecturers made even the complex parts of the course easily understandable.
―
Zvonimir Perko,
from Croatia
Professional education courses and programs for professionals with an engineering background
These specialised courses provide expert knowledge to a select group of professional learners. They are specifically designed to support their career. Typically, this type of courses includes engaged peer-to-peer interaction between professionals and offers individual feedback from TU Delft experts. The aim is to deliver advanced theoretical and practical knowledge that can be directly applied in their daily work.
Online academic courses
These are online versions of campus Master courses, intended to bridge the knowledge gap between higher education and the workplace, providing deep learning for career advancement in a given field. Professionals can subsequently expedite progress in a relevant Master’s degree on campus, by requesting the conversion of gained credentials to regular academic credits.
Microcredentials
In addition, we issue Microcredentials for several of our courses. These give learners an easy-to-share, digital-badge certification – a quality mark that demonstrates their acquired knowledge, competencies and skills.
The course on Circular Product Design Assessment helped me to develop internal KPIs on circularity and I see strong possibilities for using it as a framework.
―
Geert Doorlag,
from The Netherlands
Our dynamic approach is what allows us to cater to learners’ evolving needs and to meet the societal and market demands of professional experts.
These learners often need to combine learning with the demands of busy working and personal lives. In addition to flexibility and 24/7 digital access, they increasingly wish to shape their own learning pathways. Therefore, we also offer formats where learners can choose to follow a specific learning tracks according to their need and preference (such as in the Aircraft Performance and Open Data Use and Governance courses). This also allows us to reach a more diverse group of learners and affect more people worldwide.
The Railway Engineering courses also helped me in fulfilling the requirements of continuing education needed to maintain my chartered and registered engineer status in Australia and the UK.
―
Khalid Saleem,
from Australia
OpenCourseWare, primarily for instructors
TU Delft OpenCourseWare (OCW) supplies free and open educational resources (study materials like lectures, slides and textbooks) of high-quality, university‐level, organised as courses. You may download, revise, remix and re-distribute the resources there published as long as you adhere to the Creative Commons conditions. TU Delft is a sustaining member of Open Education Global, a global, non-profit organization supporting the development and use of open education around the world.
Solar Energy Engineering
This MicroMasters® consists of a series of five MOOCs, with an intense study load and proctored exams, which has the added benefit of accelerating a path to accredited Master education as the certificate is accepted to pursue further academic education by TU Delft, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and other universities. It covers all the physics and engineering aspects of photovoltaics: energy conversion, technologies, and systems. Learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to pursue a career in the solar energy field and become successful solar energy professionals – making an overall contribution to a more sustainable world. It is taught by photovoltaics research experts from TU Delft with many years of experience working with industry partners, amongst them Professor Arno Smets, winner of the inaugural edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions to Online Teaching and Learning.
I was able to familiarize myself with the latest theoretical knowledge on solar energy. This helped me to develop as an engineer and improve my skills.
It exceeded my expectations. Not only did I gather more PV knowledge, I also managed to get a better sense of available job opportunities. Given the accreditation, I went on to pursue an MSc in electrical power engineering at TU Delft, whereby the MicroMasters® experience gave me a head start and where I excel in all my courses and am en route to graduating cum laude.
