Want to do the Effective Field Theory course offered by MIT on Edx? Or maybe John Hopkins University’s Biostatistics Bootcamp is exactly what you need.
If the course is relevant to your research, the Graduate School will give you credits for it so you can use it as part of your individual DE Programme.
Over the past months, the Graduate School has been working on guidelines pertaining to online courses. “Until now we haven’t received a lot of enquiries, but we expect that will change in the near future, even for bachelor’s and master’s education. For now we leave it to the discretion of individual supervisors and PhD candidates, they know whether a course is of high quality and worth spending time on. The general rule of thumb is that credits correlate to the hours spent and work done on the course, like it is for on-campus courses. Moreover the course should also fit into the DE programme of the Faculty Graduate School,” says Maddy Lansbergen, the Doctoral Education Programme Manager.
PhD candidates are advised to pick platforms with a certain qualitative standard, such as Coursera, Edx or Stanford Online. However, sanctioning credits for online courses comes with its own risk. “When a candidate gets a PhD from TU Delft it is of high quality, and we have to ensure that any courses they take while pursuing that degree are of a similar standard.”
For PhD candidates, being able to do online courses means more options and flexibility in terms of schedule. Natalie Carr, a second year PhD candidate in Materials & Environment in Civil Engineering, recently completed a course in Scientific Writing offered online by Stanford University. “I choose this class because even though I am a native English speaker I still need to work on my writing skills (as does everyone since writing is an art that needs to be practiced) and that is not really an option at the GS as majority of the writing classes are geared towards non-native speakers,” say Carr.
Shruti Devasenapathy who doing her PhD in the Algorithmics Group in the SCT Department at EEMCS, did a course in Game Theory on Coursera. “Game theory is a vast subject and can be taught/studied in many different ways ranging from economic studies to behavioural science studies to computer science studies. The online course’s organisation was more tuned to what I am doing in my PhD at the moment.” Devasenapathy adds that though there was a similar course being offered at TU last September, she had to drop out as there was no time to manage that alongside her other PhD work. “In that sense, the online course gave me freedom with respect to my schedule as a PhD student,” she says.
Both candidates will receive one credit per eight to twelve hours of work. However, just because the courses were online, they weren’t an easy ride. “Besides the 2-2.5 hour long lectures every week, the course had weekly assignments in which there were problems to solve and extra reading. There was a four hour exam at the end of the course and a minimum score of 70% on all assignments was needed for a certificate of completion,” said Devasenapathy.
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