 So, welcome to this webinar on distance teaching for the partners of IHE and DFC2. And this webinar is organized by the e-learning team and the people that you see here on the screen. I would like to first give the word to Wim Duven, the coordinator of the DFC2 program to say a few words. Thank you Hans and welcome to our participants. My name is Wim Duven. I work at IHE Delft and I'm also the coordinator of the programmatic cooperation that we have with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs which is called DUPC and DUPC is our partnership program and it funds many education research and knowledge sharing activities which we jointly undertake with our partners and all these activities are focused on tackling water and development challenges in lower middle income countries in Africa, Middle East, Latin America and Asia. And for this program, distance collaboration and distance learning for the partnership has always been very important and the program has always, from the start, from the very start it has always supported this but now in the current crisis, corona crisis we are all in, this is becoming even more important and that's actually why we thought we need to start organizing this type of webinars to get in contact with our partners and to try and understand their needs and challenges and to see how we can help each other. So that's why we are giving it additional attention and we have put some information about distance collaboration, distance learning on our website and we can put the link to our website on the chat but we also do it through this seminar and I think the purpose of the seminar is, well, that first we would like to share some examples of distance teaching at IHE Delft but in the second part it's also important to open up for questions and answers you might have and also to give you the possibility to share experiences. Before I give the floor back to Hans, our idea is to have more webinars in the future for partners on different topics so if you have an idea for a topic which you think is relevant for the partnership or if you want to host or present a webinar then please let us know. So I would like to give the floor back to Hans. Thank you Wim for that introduction. So I would like to introduce the other colleagues who will also during this webinar answer your questions through the chat so if you have any questions you put it in the chat box so they can answer them and in the end we will have a plenary discussion. So there is Nadine Sander also from the DPC2 committee, we have from the Education Bureau Raquel dos Santos and Jepke Koster both very expert on e-learning and we have a lecturer Carlos Lopez Vasquez who also is going to present his work in this webinar so please engage with them. I will not look at the chat box during the presentation so I hope the colleagues can handle with all your questions. So we had a previous webinar where we discussed a lot about e-learning I'm going to repeat a little bit about that not so much but we hear all these things about e-learning, online courses, MOOCs, webinars etc but yeah why do we need to do all these things and if we would be now with a big group we would discuss it but I would now simply present to you what came out of those questions from previous sessions that we had. People say it's about increasing your impact by training more people on water related topics. Also what came up is to improve the cost effectiveness to reduce the need for students to travel especially in our type of work where we work with partners in the global south and vice versa you also work a lot with your own network in the region and that has a high cost you need to host people you need different universities to be involved and online that's of course more cost efficient. Also to facilitate the sharing of educational materials between partners through an online source that's much easier than physically sharing it and sending it around learning from each other. It's also a great opportunity to update your existing curricula because yeah you can of course start from your existing curricula and make them in some way open but it's also a great moment to look back at what you have and try to improve it and make the content really up to date and presentable through an online platform so that's important and of course address the emerging themes that would attract even more participants. Another thing that you can do is if you have it online you can cut it in pieces and offer it as professional short courses that yeah that are really offered at a regular basis you can more often offer these courses than you do with your face-to-face trainings because you don't need rooms you don't need all kinds of facilities. It's also an opportunity to develop formats and procedures for for the online education to have the same kind of quality control that we have with the face-to-face especially important for universities so that's important to have in place. We want to address also as IHE but I think also a lot of partners that when people graduate in our institute like many of us will our students will do next month that it doesn't stop there that we also offer lifelong learning for professionals that they can still follow online courses easily and it would be too expensive for us to offer all these things face-to-face and with e-learning we can offer those things. And not to forget it's very green people don't need to travel you know of course in our work that the environment is very important so green is a good argument and we can add another one like we are now in the corona crisis and we can't have people on campus e-learning is the only solution under those conditions so we see that at IHE we are now exploring all these options and applying it because we can't wait we have to continue our teaching. That brings me to this slide so at IHE in the last few weeks because of the restrictions that we have because of the corona crisis we started to exchange a lot of knowledge between lecturers and we got a lot of nice support from our colleagues from the Education Bureau we're also attending this meeting and well in the first step what you have to do is of course you don't have an online course completely ready when such a crisis starts. You can be prepared for the future but for now you need ad hoc solutions and then we speak about distance teaching and you can do that with a tool such as Big Blue Button and Big Blue Button is nicely integrated in Moodle that we use as an e-learning platform and through Big Blue Button you can of course chat with your students but you can also share the videos share webcams share audio you can even have breakout rooms it's a very nice functionality you can do polls and quizzes and you can use a multi-user whiteboard so it offers a lot of possibilities and yeah it's really great to exchange your experience on that and IHE of course can help you with exploring the functionality of tools like Big Blue Button how we're going to do to share that experience I'm going to show you in the end because we have some nice platform for that for you so the IHE we offer different modalities so the distance teaching with Big Blue Button is of course important but that's very similar to the face-to-face but what we also do is full-blown online courses where people just subscribe to the online course and go through it self-paced and well these are different modalities we also have MOOCs we did a big one for the AFRI Alliance project where also many partners were involved we have open courses I'll show that a bit open educational resources that's all kinds of videos and tutorials that that you can share with others and webinars like this one where you can put focus on on the other products you can showcase what you have and you can attract your target group to to do more with you and that's that works very well so the online courses and professional diploma courses are credited and they have a tuition fee the other modalities are are free to use these modalities need to fit into a business model in a previous webinar I've explained how that could work and how I re-engineered reverse engineered this kind of business model so in fact what you need to do in that kind of vision is that you develop your materials when there's a demand from the market in IHE the demand comes in when we do a tailor-made training for a certain client the client has a market needs and you get money and time to develop that and then you can reuse it in all these other modalities you can start with giving things for free to to other people as open courses open educational resources many people can use it and learn about what you can offer you can put it in a book that people can pay for a little amount to go themselves through it with a book or an e-book but many people want support and they want an official certificate then you can offer it as an online course still the same materials but less people will do it but these people will pay for those services and in fact you're not selling your course materials but you sell the products and services the same materials you can use in face-to-face short courses recycle it again in tailor-made trainings existing materials and use it in your daily master modules that you offer to your own students so have a look at that other webinar the link I will show you where you can find that so this is an example how you can offer that to to clients so the different modalities and then what they get for it so all the course materials are for free but then if you want added value products and services then people start paying and most flexibility you have in the tailor-made trainings now open education there is of course MOOCs where you have a large group of people following your free materials as I said we did one for actually Alliance that's a great way to showcase what you have and do things with partners together in projects for example we really encourage that you can have webinars I had this very nice one with Australian Water School where we had a thousand people spread over the globe registered and we could showcase a lot of our work including our paid online courses and then the open educational resources and the open access just to go back to what open really means that's not not just putting something out there but also allowing people and especially us in our partnership with you to use reuse and redistribute it so in fact what we make available can be non-commercially in our case be reused by others for their own students or in their own network and we hope you will do the same we have our free open courseware on our open courseware platform I'm going to demonstrate it in a bit just want to point out that we have three new ones was presented in the last webinar that was during the open education week so we have one now on irrigation management and development on delta planning and management and one on experimental methods and I'll show you the open courseware website browser so it's here ocw.un-ihc.org and there you see you can find all these courses I'm going to highlight one so here's one on GIS and in Moodle you can easily make this and we can assist you I will show you also that later how we assist you with that to to develop these kind of materials and you can embed videos playlists quizzes everything and yeah offer that to the rest of the world then we also have our closed ecampus where our own students follow classes that is not open courseware but that's what we offer to our students and this is an example of how you can apply blended learning so in blended learning we have face-to-face mixed with online so you have to give good instructions to the students it's explained here how it how it works and we come with we give a schedule so people see what they can do each day they have to prepare a video before coming to class and then in the class we will do question and answer and we do quizzes with Kahoot they can win a prize in this case they can win a sticker and it really motivates them to learn the stuff and then they can work on on an exercise so for each day we have a specific program and we mix online with face-to-face and they do then an assignment in the end so that's another way of doing an online that's blended let me go back to your presentation so our online courses I want to point out two the first one is this one so online courses they they need detailed sorry this course was was implemented by i.g. Delft with partners in this case side dev.net the now basic capacity building network water journalists africa and the university of with watersrend in Johannesburg in the dupe c2 project open water diplomacy and this is a nice example of how we develop an online course together with with you in partnership and yeah we hope that we will have those much more another example is going to be presented now by my colleague Carlos i'm going to stop my presentation and give the word to Carlos so i am Carlos Lopez i am associate professor in sanitary engineering at i.g. Delft and i have been in charge of one of the online courses developed also with funds from the UPC that this called biological waste water treatment principles modeling and design this course was one of the first courses developed by i.g. Delft actually it was it was the second online course launched in 2010 so it's a bit more than 10 years and it was the first online course that got fully credited by i.g. Delft now what was the purpose of this online course well the main purpose was to fill a gap for quite some time there were some developments main mainly made by different leading research groups around the world but they were not easily available for people from the southern countries so the main purpose was to gather all that knowledge and make it fully available for people that are very interested in these latest developments but they cannot have an easy access to this material so the first idea for the first purpose was to prepare one book that could gather all this knowledge developed or gotten in the last 20 10 15 years back then in 20 in 2027 2007 so this course covers in 18 chapters the latest developments related to wastewater treatments advancing the knowledge of very basic concepts that can be now available for different engineers and professionals on for example advanced techniques related to the removal of organic matter nutrients but also advanced processes related to disinfection toxicity and the latest techniques or technologies like moving by your reactors and membrane by your reactors among others this book was launched in 2007 and it was also very important or it's important to highlight that it was very well welcomed by the water sector the first copy of this book for example was given to the king back then the prince of orange William Alexander and in the last 10 years it became or it is the most or the best selling book of IWA the international water association now most of the success of this book is because of the content because it covers these leading edge topics that were not included in any textbook back then but the success of this online course comes from the fact that the main leading authors in this case leading researchers like for example professor Mark van Loosrecht who is who is one of the awardees of the Stockholm water prize or the Singapore water prize was one of the leading editors and leading authors of the book chapters among many others like for example professor George Kama, Moritz Henze for example so leading authors that were in that time leading these technologies now all of them came to IEG in around 2006 between 2006 2008 and they recorded different types of videos in our studio and all this material presented by them was the core or is the core of this online course so this course basically funded by the UPC gather all this information but also it helped us to upgrade our sanitary engineering specialization by incorporating all this new material into our own sanitary engineering master program who is presented as part of a module taught at IEG Delta this called conventional wastewater treatment so in this way we are also linking the online course with our regular MSc programs it has around 40 hours of video materials that cover the 18 book chapters of the of the book and for the online course and also thinking that not always for example it's easy to have a continuous access to the material the textbook and in this case the hard book of the text of the of the textbook is sent to the participants who enroll in this course and in addition also the soft copy is available at IEG Delta Ecampus this course because of all the material that it has can award up to six European credit transfer or European credits that can be used as part of in this case as part of the MSc program but also if somebody enrolls in the online course this person can also use it to pursue for example a graduate professional diploma program or can also use it as a part of an MSc in other locations since then this course has had has had every year about 30 participants enrolled every year and nowadays we have around 300 participants graduated in this in this online course now how do we roll the the course well the the course rolls out by posting the video lectures we also have different types of assignments and we provide as tutors we provide support to all the participants to study to follow up on the material but also to solve different questions and different those that they may have to track the progress we have different weekly assignments that they have to deliver one assignment per book chapter and they have to submit it in that way we can first help them to ensure that they have gotten the knowledge but also we track the progress now not everybody is interested in getting all the credits that this course can award some people are only interested in getting the knowledge so one person can follow the course and they after they complete it they can get a certificate of participation and they already have the knowledge and experience of this online course but if they are interested in getting the credits that this online course can award then in that way they should have a final oral exam so if a person is interested in getting the ects then the mark of this online course is composed of 40 percent of the average mark they get in the weekly assignments and 60 percent is an oral exam that they have to have in the very end of the of the course to be able to get these credits an important aspect to highlight is that we made an alliance with IWA so partially because this was of the this this is the best selling a book the best seller book of IWA we made an alliance with them to also promote these online course in the as a joint online course between IWA and IG Delft and the success of this book has been such that this book is now also available in different languages so we have one version in Korean in Chinese Arabic Spanish Russian and we have done these to also cover other different sectors where for example the knowledge the language careers do not allow this material to be widely distributed among different people so this is just a small snapshot of what has had what has been the this online course on biological wastewater treatment principles modeling and design and and this is also one of the the outcomes of our in this case of our IG Delft Institute one more if I may have a bit of some time to promote it and Hans has already mentioned it another one is the book methods experimentals but it's a mentor our schedule is of experimental methods for wastewater treatment is another online course that we have also launched and it's also present in the open courseware of IG or also in the link showed here on experimental methods thank you very much thank you Carlos that's an interesting presentation of a real online course that has been very successful we'll continue with the presentation so of course we would like to have you as our partners also being able to develop online courses and therefore we have for the second time we will launch this course on the designing and planning of online courses it is a six week course during this six week course we will cover the first steps of an online course development process the design and planning participants will design an online course and plan its development and implementation interacts with course participants by sharing ideas and providing feedback and an important goal is that this course can lead to further institutional initiatives in online education to increase its impact with the support of the dc2 program i'm going to give you a bit more information about that to something that i have for you which is very nice we have a sharing platform in Moodle if you go to the open courseware website simply to ocw.un-ihg.org then you can see here if you go to the right see this one dpc2 e-learning knowledge platform for partners if you go there we have here created this space on our open courseware so it's open to everybody but it's really for you our partners to share knowledge so not only from us to you but also vice versa so we can learn about solutions and challenges and help each other with this and there's different tabs here the first one is on distance communication which is very important how do we communicate in these times with each other you might have many workshops for your dpc2 projects and still want to be in touch with each other and we also encourage you to go on with the activities but using then distance communication tools there are free ones and commercial ones mentioned here then there's the tab on distance teaching where you can find a lot of information i'll come back to that tab later and here's the webinars tab where we announce webinars and collect the videos of past webinars and if you have questions and answers you can for now send it by email we're seeing how we can make it more interactively that you can also do it in a forum but we really encourage you to share your experiences so we can learn from you and others can learn from you but also your challenges where we can see how the dpc2 program can support the online activities that you want so go back to this distance teaching and as mentioned from now on you can register for this online training on online course development there's a link here and on this page you can see how to register so we ask you to apply before the third of april by sending an email to this email address and there's some documents required we need some motivation letter and yeah i hope many of you will use this very nice opportunity and let's all create a lot of nice online materials to also be robust for the future when more of these corona crisis events well hopefully not will happen but also for the good reasons that were mentioned on the first slide on why we do online education and therefore also the dpc2 program wants to support that okay i'm going back to the slides this was almost the whole presentation so i'm opening the floor for a discussion now and let's see if there are some questions in in the chat may i yes go ahead Carlos thanks hands and now something i have or one of the experiences we have had is that to make in this case an alliance with iwa help with a lot in promoting the online course so i i'm thinking that for every region maybe it can also be strategically interesting to get in contact with the local practitioners and us associations etc to know what they what what what they need what they want and also in this case the associations of what the professionals and then prepare the material according to their needs and but making the partnership maybe the partnership can help in promoting the the online course or in this case the the material targeting a specific need that they are facing yeah i think that's an important one indeed that the partnership can really extend the the target group and and the access to to the materials and you can come up with all kinds of business models that that works that you can share then the benefits of that yeah so it's not only to keep it at the level of the university but to get as much as possible into the water sector yeah there's a question from Nadine which i would like to use in the plenary is we would like to know from the the participants their experience in e-learning and distance teaching so maybe you can comment on that looking at the the attendees maybe you can share if you're already doing that or what challenges do you foresee if you're not doing it yet maybe i can give the the word to Eric to start with please share with with us your experiences so far or your ideas on on e-learning no i i i had two things from a client perspective i followed them and at ex MOOC and i found that the the timing was excellent but the it was very hard to examine there to do the examinations because you had some open questions but they were automatically checked so it that that was a really hard issue for for the course so examination could be kind of a yes maybe somebody from the education bureau can comment on that examination issue because we're also having that in at igh of course at the moment can somebody share the experiences on that hi hakel here can you hear me yep yes good well what i would like to mention is that so far for the open courses for the MOOCs and for the open courseware that we share we are not adopting examination as a more classical examination let's say but the way we we designed the course together with partners or colleagues here at igh we designed such a way that there will be steps of development so for like for example if you have 10 topics for each topic that is an activity that the participants has to complete so that he can go to the next activity and so on and at the end he has a kind of portfolio and this portfolio will be the object of examination so that's the then we have an open access certificate at the end of the course that's the way we are dealing now in what relates to open courses okay okay that sounds better than a question answer situation yeah great i'm currently looking at what i normally do is that i do a lot of face-to-face trainings and i'm looking for a substitute for that so the big blue button situation it sounds well very nice as a matter of fact so let's let's uh if you could elaborate a bit on how the big blue stuff works for you that would be great yeah we are currently building a lot of experiences with the lectures with the big blue button and so far it has been really useful i don't know if Jepke is still in the meeting i am yes maybe you can elaborate a bit on the on the big blue button and the experiences with that yeah so about two weeks ago we really started using the big blue button in in in regular teaching and so far the experience of the teachers are overall pretty positive they need some training of course in how to use it and what functionalities they have but overall when they when they had this this this training they they use it quite extensively and they are very happy with it and also from some students i've heard that they that they they they really value it um it yeah it it let's be honest it is hard to to listen to uh to someone lecturing for two hours especially behind the screen but to add some interaction and also to have chats and to have polls is is a very much added value that we that we use in using the big blue button meeting yeah i like the the option i just looked at it just in the presentation and i i really like the option for breakout rooms as well yeah that's very nice we are also planning to have the next webinar from using big blue button because described for business is very hard to to manage in webinars and we feel that big blue button is more suitable for that and so then you if you join the next webinar you can even experience it as a use the next one will be on the 2nd of april time to be announced but yeah i'll invite you in so you can see that i see it in the chat as well now yeah so that would be a good opportunity to explore the functionalities for you the subject was distance communication i would just also like to use this opportunity to mention that we would love to hear from partners what is their interest and where they see place for us to contribute to or to cover anything questions and yeah i think we can emphasize that enough yeah exactly that's the main purpose of of this webinar we hope that the people who watch this video yeah think about how we can exchange our knowledge but also that if you have challenges that you can discuss with us how we can help you to to solve those challenges yeah and maybe also if people feel that distance teaching is not not something that they can work in with within their institution that's also interesting to know and why is that in what kind of other ways are are they exploring them yeah because every condition is probably different here in in europe and the way we do it is probably very different than in other locations and we don't have much clue about how that goes and we're curious to know those solutions and those challenges yeah exactly that was it from my side thanks thank you anybody else some final remarks then maybe or well i can always say something i just would like to invite the partners the ones that are present in this meeting the ones that will watch this video afterwards to join this online course in designing planning online courses because we really go through the steps and also the the the didactics and the educational approach behind to design your course so it's a very interesting course and i really hope you subscribe i'm sure you will receive more information in the you can maybe you can put again these slides hunts so that they know where to find the information and i will try to add something to the chat so i really hope you subscribe and to see you online together with hunts okay there are several slides i will i will show again how to find it hunts yes go ahead no i i don't have any i think i i would like to thank you and also the team i think it it worked very well and because i think you know at least for me this is also quite new and it it works and i hope it also works for our partners also our partners in in in africa in the middle east and latin america so i hope that next time the next webinar we will have more participants and more interaction but but what i see is that uh you know it works and and and it's a quite pleasant way of of getting information and and and interacting with each other so that's a bit my observation of this webinar so i think we should do it so just to repeat how to to find this stuff i'm going to my browser so the first thing you you can go for all the information to ocw.un-ihg.org when you scroll down maybe the education bureau can put the title uh first or that it's at least on the first page but here you can find it you click on this dhc2 e-learning knowledge platform for partners and under the tab distance teaching but maybe we can get announcements your first and we will still work on that this is very new just in the last few days we have been developing this for you but here you find under distance teaching now the online training and if you then click here you come on this website where you find all the information on how to register and yeah please do that before the third of april and then you can get started as soon as possible okay i think that's it for now so i wish you all good luck with developing e-learning stuff i hope this was useful for you and uh yeah let's keep on exchanging knowledge on this and see you hopefully in the next webinar bye bye and thank you to the whole team yes you did a lot of work