Opening university education to the world and improving education: Using mooc-based research as a tool for innovation

Online education can be used as a catalyst for gaining knowledge on learning and learning processes due to its generation of massive corpora of data on student behaviour. This knowledge can then be utilized to improve the quality of education. Since 2013 the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) programme has created and run over forty MOOCs, gaining more than one million enrolled students in the process. As TU Delft’s MOOC programme developed and expanded over time, an organisational structure was created in which educational processes and research activities were aligned and integrated. Through this integrated organisational structure, data is collected and analysed, which has resulted in a substantial number of evaluation reports, analyses, and academic papers. TU Delft has benefited from the insights from this combined output and has adapted to the findings both in online and on-campus course design. This way TU Delft’s MOOC programme provides a valuable environment for innovating educational design experience and developing new educational delivery strategies that can also be used to improve on-campus education.