Working across disciplines is something within the DNA of 4TU.Resilience Engineering. With regard to education, 4TU.RE sets the example with the launch of the interdisciplinary educational platform, the Urban Resilience Community Platform, on edusource. Let’s find out what it is and how to use it.
Open access platform to share educational resources
Carissa Champlin, as project leader you were involved in the launch of the platform. Could you tell us more about this educational platform? Why does it say Urban? “The Urban Resilience Platform has its roots in the SURF Urban Resilience in Delta Regions project. We focused on cities – hyperconnected areas – as a case study where many of our disciplinary topics converge. This enabled us to explore interdependencies in the concepts we’re individually researching and teaching. However, the content on the platform is not exclusive to only the urban area. It serves as a starting point.”
The idea that it takes interdisciplinary research to understand grand societal challenges is at the heart of 4TU.Resilience Engineering. How does education play a role in this? Carissa: “Nowadays, we’re used to publishing our research in open access journals. There is an equal need for an open access platform to share our educational sources within the 4TU.RE community. The aim of this platform is to provide access in order to collaborate on education. By doing so, we teach our students and ourselves to truly work interdisciplinariliy.”
4TU.RE community building
An interesting side-effect emerged during the process. It turned out that the activity of creating this platform and co-creating materials was a very valuable exercise in community building. Carissa: “In the process we built a shared identity for 4TU.Resilience Engineering. We had to make our ideas on resilience explicit, it was like doing a complex jigsaw puzzle together.”
It took two years to get the platform to what it is today. Primarily lecturers contributed to the platform, but students were also involved in the development of resources. Examples of the co-creation of materials with students can be found in the collection of “Dutch and International Case Studies / City Case Studies: Student Trend Reports from Integrated Project Course”.
Adoption and adaptation – your input is always welcome
Carissa: “We are now busy understanding what is needed to adopt a resource. We hope in the near future to have an active community of adopters and a means of communicating and exchanging experiences to better understand how our resources are being used and by whom. The 4TU.Resilience Engineering community is very much invited to start using the materials: download, copy, credit and attribute, that’s all there is to it.
In an effort to better understand the needs of users of our OER platform, we would like to hear from lecturers about their interest and experience with adopting open educational resources.” Therefore, we invite you to fill in our 10-minute market survey.
Future of the platform
In the future, open access educational sources could play a more important role in the recognition and rewarding of educational efforts in academia. This platform offers a basis for further development of performance indicators such as exist in open access publishing of research. Carissa: ”I really like to think of 4TU.Resilience Engineering as a trailblazing community. I’m sure that we have built a platform that takes interdisciplinary education to the next level. We have something we can be really proud of.”
In the coming months 4TU.Resilience Engineering will launch a challenge to playfully promote the Urban Resilience Community Platform.
Interview SURF
Carissa was recently interviewed by SURF about the Urban Resilience Community Platform. The article – in Dutch – can be found here.