Following its successful launch during this year’s Open Education Week, the Delft Extension School established its Open Education Café as a platform for discussing the latest developments in open and online education.
In response to the rapid developments and growing demand for worldwide education, TU Delft plans to fully develop its extension school over the next two years, offering open and online education to students all over the world. The proposed school is meant to be the end result of a recently approved innovation programme aimed at advancing the next phase of the university’s open and online education strategy. In order to share its ideas and developments with the TU Delft community, the Delft Extension School invites all students, faculty and staff to its Open Education Café.
“The Café is a way to inform anyone at TU Delft who is interested in the developments of the innovation programme for open and online education,” says Martijn Ouwehand, Education Advisor and member of the TU Delft Open Education team. “The innovation programme will impact the university as a whole.” In effect, the Café serves as an open and informal means to explain the programme’s intentions, ambitions and how it may affect the students and staff. “The concept is based on answering questions about the developments,” Ouwehand explains. “This means there are no presentations prepared in advance and none are offered, unless our visitors ask for it or need it in order to have their questions answered. This way, the Open Education Café complements the presentations already in place that are being passed towards participants.”
Organized twice a month (tentatively until July), the Café takes place at the Coffee Star of the TU Delft Library or is hosted by one of the university faculties. Each edition features a number of specialists from the Open and Online Team. “Each time, there will be somebody available having a different type of expertise,” Ouwehand claims. “There will be experts on the entire programme, but also on Open Course Ware, Blended Education, Online Distance Education and Massive Open Online Courses.”
Through the development of open and online education, TU Delft seeks to broaden its educational reach, establishing better connections with talents and institutions worldwide. “We gain much more insight into how to develop effective education,” Ouwehand says. In doing so, the university is radically advancing the concept of campus education.
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