Since 2007 Delft University of Technology is involved with Open Education. We started with publishing the course materials of our campus courses to our OpenCourseWare website. In 2010 we started with iTunesU and in 2012 we joined the MOOC movement with joining the EdX Consortium.
In 2014 this has lead to the start of the TU Delft Extension School for Open and Online Education. As a traditional brick-and-mortar university we are moving into the world of online education, but we are not forgetting our open roots.
Open Licensing
One of the pillars of our long-term strategy is that we have a strong commitment to ‘open'. This entails that we license our course materials with an open license (CC-BY-SA-NC) to enable reuse of TU Delft course materials by others and thus increasing accessibility to Higher Education, answering the worldwide demand for education. This is also the default license for the course content of our MOOCs. We publish the videos and other learning materials under the same open license (CC-BY-SA-NC) to make it available to learners all over the world. Off course there can be exceptions due to copyright and privacy restrictions for some course materials.
Because we also have to come to a financially sustainable business model for our open & online education (we have to cover our costs), we use the Non-commercial clause. We do not uphold this condition to prevent re-use. We do this to make sure we can protect the quality and prevent (intended) misuse of our content. This means that institutions that want to charge money to their students for the access to our course materials have to ask TU Delft for permission and get a license agreement.
The NC-license gives us the opportunity to also sublicense our MOOCs to third parties, such as the Arabic platform EdRaak and Chinese platform XuatangX. Both organisations are aiming for increasing the reach/accessibility of Higher Education to regions with little access to high quality university education. Central to our licensing policy is that the course materials such as videos & texts remain freely accessible to all, while additional services for education, teaching efforts and certification can be licensed for a fee.
Business Model Early on we have recognised that if you only consider MOOCs there is no sustainable business model for a university. This is why we broadened our scope and consider our open education activities as part of our funnel towards paying (online) students.
From the production side, we will develop the content once and reuse the content in different courses for different target groups, such as a MOOC, online course, blended course on campus and publish the content on OpenCourseWare.
The first signals we have indicate that this model is working. For example 0,1% of our MOOC students applies for a master programme on campus.
We are also investigating new business models, such as sublicensing of MOOCs to other universities and platforms.
