 Hello, welcome everybody. We're at the Open Education Week 2023 and for that occasion we have this nice live session on the IHG Delft YouTube channel. Welcome everybody and we would like to show you what IHG Delft has to offer in terms of open courseware. But before we do that, I would like to introduce the guests of today. I'll start with Masa. Can you briefly introduce yourself? Yes, sure. Hi everyone and thanks for your time and joining us today. If we have any women today in our crowds, just wanted to say happy International Women's Day to all of you as well. My name is Masa and I work at IHG Education Bureau in the e-learning development team. I've been with IHG for five months now and I have been very keenly working on the open courseware with my colleagues who are here today and hoping to have a good conversation with you all. Thanks Masa. Marius, can you introduce yourself? Hello everybody. My name is Marius Möhl and I'm an associate professor of water resources management here at IHG Delft and I also coordinated team on water accounting and water productivity analysis using remote sensing. And we're a team that develops a lot of the open courseware that I will also be talking about today. So nice to be here. And let me also introduce myself. I'm Hans van der Kwast, associate professor of open science and digital innovation. But I'm also the professional training program coordinator of IHG Delft. It's quite a new young group where we work on making more courses available for professional trainings for professionals in the water sector because we also have of course our master programs and open courseware also falls under the professional training program committee. So if you have any questions during this live session, please use the live chat and we will get back to you to answer them. And then I would like to now give the floor to Masa to tell us something more about open courseware at IHG Delft. Sure. Thanks, Hans. I just first want to take everyone who is able to see my screen to take you to the website that IHG has. This website is a good source for you guys to be able to find the educational resources that IHG has to offer. Firstly, by going here you're able to see any new courses in the open courseware. As the name suggests, it is open and accessible to everyone with a list of available courses that are currently being offered. Please be aware that this is an ongoing process, so that means that new courses are coming up quite often and therefore we ask you to please kindly check back on this list. The list is being updated all the time and the list will take you to IHG Delft open courseware, which is where the courses are stored. By going to this platform you're able to see that after clicking on the open courseware materials you are able to access the courses that IHG has to offer. Although we have open courses, they are in different categories, so by clicking on the left-hand side on the drop-down menu you will be able to have a look at the categories that IHG offers. The open courses are those courses that are open to you at a self-paced manner, so you're welcome to use them whenever you want and use the parts of the course or all of the course whatever is applicable to you and the specific knowledge you want to access. However, we also have certificate courses. These are the courses that will generate a certificate of attendance at the end if you have met certain criteria that your lecturers would put for those. We also might be of interest to you to know that we also have prep courses. You will see them in these categories. The prep courses are those courses that are usually taken by students who are hoping to study very soon or if they've signed up with IHG to do a master's degree. Some of them will require a key or a password, but also some of them you can browse through already and these are the specific groups and courses with keys. By going to the category of open course where you're able to see the courses in the open course where the ones are not generating certificates, the only thing you need to be aware of is that most of these courses would require a very simple registration. This registration is nothing very difficult or intrusive at all. It's just that you need to fill in a username and a password and just fill in your email address and you can enroll yourself in a matter of seconds. It's very easy and then you can access that course anytime you wish. For the courses that require for you, if you wish to get access to our certificate, you are able to do the same exactly through the same registration method. It is not very difficult and the last thing I would like to add here in the open course where is that we have courses in English mainly but we also offer some of our great MOOCs in French. We have MOOCs in Spanish, in Arabic and there will be more to come. For our Spanish and French speakers, be aware that there is more to come mid-March onwards and they will be launched very very soon. Lastly from me, I just want to get your attention to the open courseware for GIS which my colleague Hans will talk about in a short bit. GIS open course where hosts courses related to GIS. As the name suggests and it's one of our very popular platforms, the system and the user experience for it is very very similar to our open courseware, main open courseware platform. What might be of interest to you is the diversity of the courses and as you see in the categories of GIS we have courses in Japanese, in Portuguese, in Dutch. We have a course in Persian and French and English as well so it can be related to a very large range of audiences. We are working very hard to make these platforms even more expensive and more interesting for you guys so keep an eye out on our website, keep an eye out for our platform and what's coming up there and always feel free to ask us a question. You're able to contact us if you have any questions about any of the courses. We are here for you to answer them. I hope that you enjoy what's there and keep an eye out for more. Thank you, Massa. That was all my tour and I really hope that people are watching are going to check out these courses that we offer. I would like to introduce our next speaker, Marius Mil. Hi Marius, are you ready for your presentation? Yes, I am. All right, so I'll be giving some background on some of the courses that my team has developed and that's on water counting. I'll give you a brief tour on how they came about, what our currently experiences are, and what are the upcoming activities that we're planning on an open course related to the topic on using remote sensing for all kinds of analysis. The three existing courses that are currently available are related to the vapor database. I'll tell you a little bit more about that later on and how to do analysis using this open data. It's also open data week this week, so that's another shout out for a nice event. Also, there's a MOOC on water accounting and water auditing that's available and there's a MOOC on water productivity and practice that we developed under one of the projects. I'll take you a little bit through the MOOC on the first one, on water productivity and water accounting using vapor and explain a little bit the process of how it came about, what the current status is, and what we learned from all these experiences on these different MOOCs and where we go from here. Why did we actually decide to develop a MOOC? We're part of this project and the project is about providing an open access database on spatial derived data regarding evapotranspiration and biomass production and that is hosted by FAO. It's the vapor database and over a number of years we've implemented many trainings, so we visited 16 countries and we trained about 300 people on what this database is about, how to use it and what can be done with the database. Over these three years we reached around 300 people. At the end of the project, so this was the first phase, we just started a second phase, but at the end of the first phase we had all these training materials and they could have ended up on the shelves because the project had ended. At the end of the year, at the end of the project we had a little budget available and with the client FAO, we also decided to turn this training material into an open courseware. We currently have, so we developed the courseware and what is really nice is that we now have two thousands that are enrolled in different countries and that includes countries that are not covered by VAP or you saw from the original map that only Africa and the Middle East had data. So there were all these people interested globally in the database that could follow and access materials through our open courseware and are currently taking or making use of the information that we put online. It's actually very much relevant today because next to these 16 countries that we visited, of course there are more countries in the current extent of the VAP or database, but in the next couple of months the VAP or data will also be available on a global scale. So this material will even become more relevant when more people want to use the data for their applications or whatever they want to use the data for. So the data or the training that we're currently doing with this open courseware making it available, you can see it reaches much more people who can access the materials and it actually costs much less money because can you imagine how much it costs for us to go to these 16 countries train a number of people. So it actually provides a huge outreach of the training materials that we've developed. So this was one of the reasons behind why we have it and you can see that the experience is that we made a big impact with the training. So a little bit of background. So we launched it in September 2020 and we also developed based on the interest from the client, from FAU, we also made a French and an Arabic course based on the English version. It's all self-paced and you can start anytime, even now you can enroll, start anytime and do whenever you have a couple of hours, work on it and expand it and do the exercises, the assignments. So we have three different modules in the in the course, a very basic introduction of what the vapor data is about and how to use the portal and then two applications on using the vapor data for water productivity analysis and using the vapor data for water accounting. And the course has all kinds of material in the the course, some theoretical lectures and background documents to explain things. Also some instruction videos on how to do stuff like what MASA did today in, you know, showing where to find what information and different types of assignments. So we've got some post to forum or discussion, fill out surveys type of activities and we also have quizzes and with the Moodle platform we've got all types of quizzes. So it's not only a multiple choice quiz, but it also has all kinds of fun quizzes where you have to match one thing with the other and you can check whether or not you've understood what was presented in the presentations. And then after you've completed successfully the assignments and the quizzes, you can actually get a certificate for each of these components. So you can get a component for just a basic introduction to vapor or a particular application of the vapor database. So what did we learn from the implementation of this training? So we really see this as a very nice reference materials for all people that are interested in the topic. So it provides a very nice location for people who are interested, maybe even just a basic interest on how to use vapor database and they can access it, they can look at some of the tutorials and do some of the assignments. We also have at the end of the courses a survey that people have to fill out when they get the certificate and they come back with a lot of positive feedback. But of course, these are the people that complete the training. So it might be a bit biased with the people who are excited and want to complete. We don't hear much about the ones that don't complete it so that's a bit unfortunate. We do find that somehow the online engagement between participants is a bit limited and we really want to look at how to improve that. And some frustration we also see here and there on some of the restrictions that we put into the system that you have to complete A before you can go to Section B and some assignments might also find some participants might find them a bit difficult or maybe not too clear. And then we also find that only a limited number of participants fully complete the course and we do put a lot of effort in putting a lot of materials and assignments. So it is actually a lot of work to complete it. So this particular MOOC is about one week for each module. So it's quite a heavy investment for participants to complete the course. So you can imagine if you do that on your own, you might not complete the course. But that is what it is. But we do see that especially for the first point, good reference material, we do see a lot of people joining the platform, engaging with the materials, but don't necessarily follow the assignments. But they do see it as a nice reference material that they can look back at and use when they do the, yeah, when they start using the Vapor Database. Another interesting outcome in the feedback from the implementation of this open course where we do see it as also a way to showcase what we as IHEDALF can do. It shows our expertise on the subject and it highlights our profile on the global stage, I would say. We also do realize that because we developed the materials for face-to-face training and we tested that many times, it also helps test the material and make it very relevant. We also see that it becomes a very nice repository. Also for us, when we do want to do a face-to-face training, there's a request to do a face-to-face training, we can utilize the materials and we also allow our parts to use the material in particular, the right cream, so they can use it, they cannot use it for commercials, but it is, the materials are free to be reused by whoever wants to do it in their training or their training. When they're at university, they provide materials for people to share and utilize. I want to have a cup of tea, so all developed are project activities, so it's all reused by projects in terms of time. We tested and we had the trainings before, but that really showed that if we do have these projects and we develop training materials, it's really a small step to get into an open course, an open course where more people can benefit from it. We also actually generate interest from prospective students here at IHE, so people who might be interested to follow other open courses or might be interested to join some of the short courses that we offer here at IHE or may it be interested in joining the Master's program or apply for a PhD position institute, so we do see it provides a lot of interest, generates a lot of interest beyond just providing one course. Then a bit looking at towards the future, so we are very much aware that we want to improve more from translating face-to-face training materials into an open course where we do need to think a little bit, we need to think better about how to present the materials and how to see if we can get more engagement with the people that are following these trainings, so we want to develop more engaging activities to engage the participants with each other but also to engage more with the materials and we also are testing out new templates that we also want to see how we can present the materials in an intuitive way on the platform, so we're still testing a little bit out these templates and we're working together with Masa and her team at the Education Bureau and the Institute and then there are some exciting upcoming new coursewares that are coming up, so there's one that my team is developing on again the vapor database on what the concepts are and some validation that will come out in June and in the next couple of years we do have a number of other open coursewares that we are thinking about and conceptualizing and they will come in the next couple of years and then yeah next to the ones that my team is developing there are also some other self-based courses that are available and for instance just a few that I'm presenting here on environmental flow requirements and the SDGs that was also developed in close collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization and one on Fresh Water Health, so yeah do look at or investigate our platform see what's happening and maybe there's a topic that is of interest to you that you want to follow and then of course the one that we're developing that is coming soon so for more information also I mean it's not a lot of information but we have also a team website where we also provide all the links and to all the materials the open coursewares so you can go to the watercounting.un-ihg.org website you can get all the information regarding capacity building and when we have new open coursewares developed we also provide all the information here and the links that will be made available so that's for me Hans that was a nice presentation Marius thank you I think it gave a great overview of what your team is is offering and also what my takeaways are is how you get spinoff from projects and fit with the goal of IHE Delft to disseminate knowledge so once we have made courses for projects it's really great that more and more people can use that as open courseware and also great to see what future plans you have and the cooperation with the Education Bureau on improving the courses and the lessons learned from what we already offer so I think that's that's great and it's I think it's also an example for others in the institute maybe to to also open up in this way the course materials and I also like what you said about that that many people maybe also are triggered to follow other products that IHE Delft offers like our paid short courses and we also have short courses for scholarship participants or even join our masters on water and sustainable development so I think that was all great so I'm next so I will present a little bit more about GS open courseware that Masa already introduced briefly so it's another open courseware website it also runs on Moodle and I was very happy that IHE offered me the opportunity to share specific courses on GIS through this platform and I'm going to give you a little tour so if you are not on Twitter then you can find here with this little hidden secret here this arrow you can find tweets about open courses webinars announcements and tools information about tools open source GIS tools so always useful to go through and to find all the actual news there so that's something you can look at and here if you scroll down you will find the banner with the courses and we have just launched this one QGIS for precision agriculture and in fact that's a bit similar that what Marlous explained it's a spin-off from our master program in this case so not from a project but currently I'm teaching with with colleagues Sajid Parid and Ahmed Alnagar and Abbebe Shukla course on QGIS for precision or not QGIS for precision agriculture but on sensing and geo processing for precision agriculture but the GIS modules I took them out of that course and I present them here so here you can find the courses course materials they come with youtube videos and you can follow these tutorials on the right side you find the outline and what you can see from this platform is there's no need to register just simply click on on one of those course titles and you can join you can also see here that many courses are available in different languages we have many volunteers translating these courses so you're invited to to cooperate if you would like to translate the course to your own language then you just contact me and I'll make the course available for editing and you can work on the translation we have a lot of courses in in french also from translated from the projects as Marius also explained we have here a tile which is about the phosphor g conference that's an international conference on open source GIS software and every time I give a workshop I will host it also here on the platform so you can even if you're not at the conference just follow the workshop here it's quite a big one about using the pc raster tools plugin that I've developed and you can use that as a tool in QGIS or create a graphical model doing map algebraic python and it's a very useful tool for for hydrologists this one was based on a summer course that I gave for ihe delft students and it's also interesting if you're interested me if you are into visualization of data I think the communication of data is an important topic and there's just visualization of data in maps about symbolizing points styling rivers making coropolis maps but also 3d with area lot is another open source tool and there is also a section on creating animations which is also very cool where you can work on animating data from polygons but also visualize and animate mesh data and make graphs and these step-by-step tutorials they have all the screenshots that you need to get you through so you just simply click on those tiles and and follow it if you're a beginner with programming or you want to learn programming then I can really advise to follow this course program for geospatial hydrological applications if you go there then you will first learn the command line interface and using gdoll and then you will get into python we use jupyter notebooks so there's videos you can open the the notebooks here in binder there are some little issues here with the template because there has been an update it used to look better but we're working on it and if you need any support you want to have a training on one of these courses with support then you can contact us and we can provide individual training or training for your organization on these topics there's a very nice course on google earth engine for agro hydrological applications processing drone images I also like very much these qgs advanced tutorials that go a bit more into morphometric parameters that you can calculate from gis data and they'll be further expanded when more is released there's also this tile how can I contribute so if you want to translate I already said you can contribute in that way but if you want to host your own free gis tutorial but you don't have a moodle and you like what we do then just contact me and we can add your course here to the gs open course platform and I'm very happy that quicheng Wu who's very famous for his google earth engine materials and videos that he donated this course to our platform so it's there available with all the videos but if you're interested then just contact us and we'll make your course available there marlos also mentioned that it was open data day and last year in open data day I've added here a course it's not really a course but an overview of free data sources that you can use for gis so plugins spatial data infrastructures and then thematic ones on water for example and if you are missing something just let me know and I will add it and I think it's very useful for people to find the nice data sets that you also find here FAO vapor that Marlos was talking about so a lot of nice free resources and let's just for fun look into a course in another language let's use french here and you see here qgis for hydrological applications translated in french the english version is it's not available for free we use that in our paid courses but the translated versions are for free and I think that is that's really great and we will have also the the new version based on the the book with the same name qgis for hydrological applications available also in french soon because there's a volunteer from Algeria who's going to translate the book that was all I wanted to share about gis open courseware so I invite all the speakers back to have maybe a final discussion I see we have some participants that have asked questions here so maybe we can have a look at some of the questions there's a question here from goba koumar is software used in different courses freeware if not whether the software will be provided I think in most of our open courseware we also use open source software so you don't have to buy software and get the license and often it's also explained how to install the software set it up on your computer I think a great thing of IHG Delft is that we really would like to have also the software that we use in our courses open source also in our research and that we try to mainstream that in the way we work if the others have something to add please let me know no I fully agree and especially the open courseware materials will be using open access and open yeah open access models and softwares so make sure that everybody can follow the courses and you don't need a license for anything there are free courses on very expensive GIS software but yeah then you still need to buy it and we don't want to to lock you into these kind of products so disseminating knowledge also means you need to disseminate the right tools to to use open data and to do good things with water so maybe a question to Masa can you elaborate elaborate a little bit on on the plans that did you have with the education bureau or your ideas or suggestions for open courseware yes sure um good question there I um highly encourage people to take the courses we have as much as it's applicable to um to their plans to their professional plans or their personal interests and I really also highly encourage you to give us feedback um because open courseware is a very um alive and interesting project that we're working on alive as in a sense that we would like to promote it but also make it better every day so please provide us feedback in the feedback tools we have on each course most of our courses especially the new ones um have really specific feedback that you can provide we would love to to hear from you and what do you think um as far as future plans we are hoping to work with with you guys and with other amazing lecturers that we have who are offering open courses to make them more interactive and also to build a sense of community between the learners although it's an online course and although it's self-paced but there is so much room for us to to work on learning from each other and teacher and student interaction but also student to student interaction um some of it might not be live interaction like we are having now but still we are working um towards making those um those scenarios happen for everyone um just so that you know we have had courses in open course where um some of them even um for six seven eight years um but um that you will also um hopefully see a shift to how the courses will behave and how you will remain engaged the last thing I want to point out is that um I think um that everyone would agree that it's very important when you access your courses that they give you the same experience in learning um if you're using your mobile phone if you're using a tablet if you're using your computer um it's very important that the that the learning experience um is very intuitive and very user friendly for for all of you so we are also working towards making that happen um that is why your feedback is very much appreciated um so that uh we can we can learn what is it that you'd like to see more of whether that's content-wise or whether that's um design and feel-wise um please let us know yeah thanks Massa and I think it also tackles a bit what Marlos presented more engagement also uh in these kind of platforms between the participants I think that's very nice I see in the chat that there are some suggestions for courses uh I think that's that's good for us to to know um for example uh there is a request for for courses on um water diplomacy, transboundary water diplomacy um and I think we can see what colleagues have to offer and see if we can open up more of the courses that we developed also for our new masters as a open coursework um there's a question here from Luna Luna lost me we didn't lose you if we want to replicate the course with our own data can I contact the instructor to ask well the the idea between behind open coursework is that it's all self-paced and without support that's also how it financially works best because we offer that for free and we don't spend hours on responding to individual requests for those things we have our paid products um but these courses are should be made especially I think my GIS courses to also apply on your own data in your own cases and if you just follow those tutorials my advice is always to try it first with the the exercise data that is provided and then try to repeat it for your own case study and of course when you're stuck you can try to ask questions via social media if it's there's a youtube video where I explain things and you're stuck then just post a comment and most of the times I will answer but with the open coursework we don't generally answer many questions through the platform because that that's very difficult you can imagine that there are many more people hopefully following the open coursework and if we need to answer all the emails and requests and we wouldn't be able to make nice new more open courses for you but you can also ask your your fellow participants if they have the solution if you have a certain error in your model or in the analysis you can also ask them hey did you have this this problem as well and how do you fix it it's a good suggestion indeed to have a discussion forum where you can help each other we also try to apply that in in the live classes because it's a real world skill when there's no lecturer around then you need to ask your questions on forum and on the internet and asking good questions is also a really good skill and helping each other is also by helping a person you also learn a lot okay I don't see any more questions any final remarks from the panel here masa final words no I just wanted to say thanks guys for coming in and thanks for your questions and remarks and I hope that you stay engaged with our platform and I hope that we can hear from you in the forums that we have in each course and also in the feedbacks and comments that you can provide to us please feel free to always reach out through those means in each specific course we are doing our best to to implement as many good views and opinions that you guys have so thanks for joining thanks masa malus some final words well I mean it's nice to be in this session so thanks Hans also for organizing the Andres who was behind the behind the the camera who was helping us with this session so yeah very nice discussion I also liked your presentations and yeah for the audience yeah check out our courseware and if there's anything that's not working don't hesitate also let us know so we can you know solve the problem rather than you getting frustrated so let us know if there's anything that you like but also let us know if there's something that you don't like then we can you know try to improve it and we always learn we always try to make it better and and get more exciting material out there so yeah we're always making progress and and trying to improve things so nice to be here thanks malus I don't think I have much to add also would like to thank Andres in the background moderating the technology here and I would like to thank all the viewers and the questions that we had and of course these nice presenters colleagues who are presented about open courseware and I'm very much looking forward to see more people using the open courseware and from our side to produce more useful open courseware that that you like so keep in touch and have a nice open education week and hopefully see you sometime maybe online or on campus at IHE Delft. Bye bye. Bye.