On education and learning

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On education and learning

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Dirk Jan van den Berg

President of the Executive Board of Delft University of Technology

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Address at the172nd Dies Natalis Delft University of Technology

January 10, 2014 Delft, The Netherlands

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Albert Einstein is quoted to have said that the only thing that interfered with his learning was his education. This is rather discouraging for someone heading a univer-sity that puts education so much at the centre of its identity and actions. On further reflection Einstein’s remark puts us right in the middle of our debate on education: its methodology, its means of delivery, its environment, its learning outcomes and the measurement of its success.

Delft University of Technology is proud of its roots as the country’s oldest engineering school. Of course, we transformed our institution in the past 50 years into a very suc-cessful and world wide known research intensive University of Technology. However education is in the heart of our mission and our research efforts greatly contribute to the high quality of our courses. That very educational mission is being challenged in many ways, in terms of volume as well as in terms of content.

On volume some want us to believe there is no problem at all when it comes to the number of engineers. This contrasts very sharply with other reports stating that thou-sands of engineers will reach the retirement age in the coming decade without suffi-cient replacement by younger cohorts. One can really wonder whether this is a fruitful debate. The fact of the matter is that Government policy radiates high ambitions in the area of innovation and economic activity. Successful outcomes can only be achieved if there will be a steadily increasing flow of graduates in science and tech-nology. In short, either way around, we need more engineers.

Also from a global perspective volumes of higher education are being challenged. Currently there are about 400 mln. young people in the tertiary education age-brack-ets, who do not have access to a university education. Imagine, if only 5% opts for a university education in science and engineering, the world would need another 1000 TU Delfts to meet this demand. All in all, whatever perspective one takes, we are well advised to be very ambitious in the number of graduates, national and international, our university delivers.

This immediately raises questions on our teaching capacity. Currently we have about 20.000 bachelors and masters students enrolled. While we have seen important in-creases in enrolment of over 40% compared to 6-7 years ago, the first funding stream did not cover for the additional educational efforts associated with these growing numbers. The reason is very straightforward, our “market share” in higher education remained unchanged, since other universities grew in equal numbers or even more. Though not explicitly stated, higher education policy in the Netherlands relies heavily on the ability of universities to realise high operational efficiency gains, and so they did. I do not have concrete evidence, but I suspect the HE-sector to be one of the most successful in the public sector in realising such huge productivity gains.

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I fear that further efficiency gains will prove to be difficult, since our reliance on the motivation and efforts of our teaching staff, both researchers and teachers, cannot be limitless. Our recent struggle to cope with the important increase in enrolment in the mechanical engineering faculty demonstrates my point. One more time we will run the extra mile to achieve an increase in educational capacity in order to lift the fixus for enrolment in 2015, but that’s where the bug stops.

I am well aware that these are not the times to ask bluntly for additional funding. However, within the budget, both government and universities need to work together to promote opportunities for efficiency. In 2010 the HE-sector and the government agreed on the so called “Headline Agreement”, which should serve as a common point of departure. For example, one element focuses on additional requirements at the initial enrolment. Let’s face it, looking at our experience, there is a relationship between secondary school results, especially in mathematics, and success-rates at TU Delft. Motivation is of course a key driver but without sufficiently adequate capabili-ties success will only prevail in very rare cases.

Currently 1/3 of our first year students does not pass the compulsory 45 study points after their first year and has to leave the programme they have chosen. Of course, mismatches can happen, but wouldn’t time be better spent for both students and teachers, if a reality check takes place at the very entrance of the university? Take the case of MIT where there is a very strict admission policy allowing about 1800 students in, out of almost 20.000 applications. Consequently 98% of the students complete their degree succesfully. If universities would be allowed to develop fair and tailor made admission policies, funding mechanism should not be geared to throughput metrics but rather on output and the capacity required to achieve this output. Let’s now focus on learning outcomes. Already for some time our educational effort focuses on the importance to prepare our students for a global outlook beyond their direct domain of choice. We want our students to understand the wide ranging na-ture of global challenges and the intrinsic multi-disciplinarity associated with it. Awareness of ethical issues related to the nature and use of technologies are of equal importance. A fundamental comprehension of how society functions and what the roles are of a variety of key players should be in every graduate’s intellectual toolkit. But more mundane learning outcomes require our attention as well. Things like work-ing in a team, exerciswork-ing leadership responsibilities, presentwork-ing your thoughts in a convincing manner, managing a project time line, starting up a company will prove to be very useful in a future professional life. Many offerings in our educational pro-grams aim at including training in these kind capabilities. Our quite rich setting of student associations and clubs plus our dream-teams do contribute importantly to this kind of learning outcomes. I am happy to repeat here that we highly value the effort put into this by our students. And, of course, I am extremely proud by the im-pressive series of successes of the Delft dream teams in such a wide range of differ-ent fields, ranging from IGEM to the Nuon Solar Team.

The inner core of learning outcomes at TU Delft is of course to educate young men and women to become excellent engineers. In this respect we can be quite pleased with the very positive feedback we receive about the quality of our graduates. How-ever this is not an eternal given. We should keep close track of how engineering work is developing. Important trends like the need for engineering multi-disciplinarity and the increase of thorough systems thinking are examples. These are in itself maybe not new, but certainly re-valued by future employers as important components for our graduate’s knowledge base. We will have to respond to that.

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I believe it quite safe to predict we will see landslide changes in teaching modalities in the decade ahead of us. Developments in on line learning take place at breath-tak-ing speed. One of the key drivers will be the millions of young people seekbreath-tak-ing access to higher education at bearable costs. But presence of on line learning materials will affect the traditional on campus educational system as well. Flipped classrooms that focus on explaining and training the online materials offered by first class institutions in particular fields will become part and parcel of educational programs.

Where will on line education bring us? It will have its impact into several directions. It will link us up with an until now unimaginable number of talented students. Professors will interact in one course with numbers of students which they could never reach in a professional life time. Take for example Arno Smets, who has certificated 3000 learn-ers in one single MOOC, while he is teaching a 40 student master program; he would have to live a professional career of 75 years to reach 3000 students. I do wish him well of course, but this could be a bit over the top. This immediately entails follow up questions on how to set up the mechanisms to encourage and to enable the most talented among our on-line learners to come to Delft and to participate in our master programs, specialised summer schools, research projects or other avenues into the Delft community.

It will give rise to new teaching and research communities. Imagine teaming up with the best in your field in the design and implementation of online courses. On line- technologies will allow for sharing of facilities and participating in experiments that take place thousands of miles away. New international alliances will be forged, push-ing universities even further into an increaspush-ingly global playpush-ing field. Students will have the opportunity to work with fellow-students from all over the world.

It will greatly diversify the background and learning goals of the participating ers. Professionals who want to update their knowledge of their field. Life long learn-ers who want to keep abreast with the latest in science. School-kids preparing their entrance into university life. Students seeking to get a degree. Highschool teachers preparing up to date classes. It will also give rise to new players, like companies that will set up their own package of on line courses for their employees to follow. New third parties will emerge that will bundle on line offerings into complete programs, which will present a value in terms of job opportunities.

All this will challenge universities as we know them today. There is no reason why we should duck. TU Delft can be one of the leading providers of best of class on line learning materials. From the very beginning of Open Courseware our university has invested in being among the first to set up an extensive OCW offering. With the rocket-like emergence of MOOC’s, once again we stepped up the plate being one of the leading institutions in the development of MOOC’s. We are inner-core members of the edX-platform, which provides us with a very inspiring environment being close to the latest of developments. We are eagerly looking forward to welcome our edX-partners in Delft, June this year.

It should be well understood MOOC’s are but a stage in the development of on line education. The next step will be the development of credited courses either in a modular mode or in a complete program package. Reason why we believe speed is of the essence. We will set up a separate entity, inspired by the Harvard Extension School, to support faculties in the development of their on line offerings, to create a focal point of expertise of on line learning and to initiate new directions in on line learning and its educational methodology. Our strategy is to be at the forefront. We rather risk to make mistakes than to miss the boat.

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These developments will, in all likelihood, put national policy frameworks to the test. We are looking forward to share and to work closely together with our colleagues of other universities and of the Ministry of Education to define the right dilemma’s and to discuss choices to be made. We expect our colleagues of the Ministry of Education to allow for experiment and to share our eagerness to explore the future of higher education. I am very much encouraged by the communication on online education the minister of Education send to Parliament the day before yesterday. She expresses a clear will to allow the HE-sector to experiment, to innovate and to enter into the realm of on line credited courses.

Yes, it will challenge the national prerogative on educational matters, but even more so it will create tremendous opportunities for the research and higher education sys-tem in the Netherlands. Hopefully the upcoming white paper on Science policy will include a holistic, future oriented vision on the role of universities, not only in research but on education as well, since the two are inseparable. I sincerely hope we will grasp this opportunity to ground our analysis on how the university sector performs on a much broader set of observations compared to the current rather narrow metrics in the performance agreements.

Let’s move now from clicks to bricks. Some might argue that mortar and bricks do not bear any relevance anymore in the future on line world. I believe otherwise. A univer-sity that is well embedded in the national eco-science system and is well equipped with facilities for teaching and research, will comply with the key prerequisites for suc-cess in the on line world. It is therefor important to invest in our campus and thanks to all our efforts of the past 4 years we can now spend 600 mlm. euro’s in the coming 8 years to align our facilities in education and research with the best in the world. It will give us an opportunity to create an educational environment commensurate to the latest developments in educational methodology. It will also give an opportunity to prepare our campus for whatever on line education might bring us. Imagine our campus swarmed with people from all over the world in January or in July and August participating in whatever we will offer to accommodate our on line learners.

May you live in interesting times, as the Chinese expression goes. It is not always meant in a positive way, I must warn you. But I consider it a privilege, in fact for all of us, to guide Delft University of Technology through these indeed inescapably inter-esting times.

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