Online Education

The IHE Delft OCW allows access to high-quality educational resources open and for free, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. These educational resources focus on various water and development subjects for a broad audience looking for an introduction to these topics. The content is often developed with partner organisations. It targets the practitioners and students that have the ambition to strengthen their knowledge individually on a part-time basis and at their own pace (self-study). Around 60% of all visitors in 2021, are from low- and middle-income countries, similarly to the pattern observed in the statistics of 2020, indicating the potential of the platform in including professionals from these countries in lifelong learning initiatives.

Access the OCW website here

IHE Delft offers accredited online courses for professionals in the water sector who hold a Bachelor Degree in a relevant field of study, allowing IHE’s learners to study part-time, without interrupting a day-time career. These online courses offer facilitated part-time learning, and require a tuition fee and admission requirements. The number of online courses offered in the past four years were: 15 (2021), 16 (2020), 20 (2019), and 17 (2018). The numbers of online course participants in the past three years were: 193 (2021), 176 (2020), 100 (2019), and 109 (2018), totaling in 578 enrollments in online courses during this timeframe.

Access the OLC website here

The professional training programmes (GPDP) consists of a sequence of either four or five online courses around a certain subject. Much like online courses, a professional training programme aims to provide access to education for professionals without the means, time or interest to pursue an MSc degree. Under DUPC2 four new professional training programmes are under development with partners from DUPC2 focus countries:

• Water Strategy and Planning: a joint collaboration between IHE Delft and TU Delft. This programme combines existing and developing courses at both institutes, into a joint programme. To learn more, visit the programme website, or read this article.
• Humanitarian WASH in collaboration with UNICEF: To address the increasing challenge of delivering timely and effective responses at scale within the humanitarian WASH sector, UNICEF and IHE Delft started a collaboration to address the training needs of the humanitarian WASH sector. 
• Water for Food Security: this project provides a program on water for food security, for mid-career agricultural water professionals and practitioners. 
• Water Technologies and Management: with Pune University, India.

Learn more on the GPDP website

This activity aims to strengthen eLearning capacities of IHE partners through training and education on online education, knowledge sharing and learning, advice and (limited) equipment. Apart from support to IHE partners upon request, the project also aims to engage in strategic partnerships on eLearning with institutions and/or networks in the DUPC2 focus regions. WaterNet in Southern Africa asked for support in implementing its eLearning ambitions. WaterNet lecturers followed an online training on online course development, and in 2021 four courses were delivered as pilots. The Collaborative Knowledge Network Indonesia (CKNet) in Indonesia developed eight modules including one on Integrated Flood Risk Management. Furthermore, the Erasmus+ project eMWRE is co-funded which supports the development of an eLearning Master in Water Resources Engineering by universities in Palestine and Jordan. Additionally, a call for the development of eLearning products aimed at partners from DUPC2 focus countries and regions with functioning education platforms resulted in six projects, a.o. Birzeit University, Bandung Institute of Technology, Institut National de l’Eau Benin.

With increasing competition over water resources, there is a need for a consistent and transparent reporting of the distribution and use of water between sectors, countries and users to inform river basin planning. The Water Accounting Plus (WA+) framework was developed at IHE with funding from the DUPC2 programme to provide such information using various types of open access databases, including satellite remote sensing data. WA+ provides aggregated information at river basin level in a spatially and temporally distributed manner, while making explicit the water use associated with different land use types.

The following three objectives were identified for this project: 

1. Increase uptake of WA+ results to inform decision making
2. Improve accuracy of WA+ outputs and understanding of uncertainties
3. Education, capacity development and dissemination of the WA+ framework and tools

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