IDE TEACHERS' MANUAL

Education at IDE

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The Faculty of IDE offers four degree programmes:

The BSc in Industrial Design Engineering
The MSc in Design for Interaction (DfI)
The MSc in Integrated Product Design (IPD)
The MSc in Strategic Product Design (SPD)

Depending on their profile, the academic staff of the Design, Organisation and Strategy (DOS), Human-Centered Design (HCD) and Sustainable Design Engineering (SDE) departments teach in one or more of the faculty’s degree programmes.

For each degree programme, a graduate profile, a set of final attainment levels and a didactic concept have been drawn up. These three documents form the basis for the curriculum of the programmes. Each degree programme also has its own Teaching and Examination Regulations (OER) and Rules and Guidelines of the Board of Examiners (RRvE). These documents stipulate, among other things, that students must register for courses and examinations, and they set out the assessment and pass-and-fail rules for a course, the examination procedure, the marking period and the opportunities available to students to inspect their marked work.

The curriculum consists of a set of compulsory and elective modules. For each course, the teaching board appoints one course coordinator. This is done in consultation with the department in which the course coordinator works.

For the preparation and provision of the course, the course coordinator cooperates with a team of lecturers. The composition of this team is determined in consultation with the director of education as part of the teaching capacity planning.

You will find important information about teaching a course on the IDE employee portal. It may also be useful to browse the IDE student portal and the TU Delft student portal. These portals include the information that students have at their disposal to organise and arrange their studies in the best possible way.

The faculty is headed by the dean, who bears responsibility for research, education and management. The dean is advised by the Management Team comprising the three department directors, the director of research, the director of education and the executive secretary.

The director of education chairs the Board of Education that consists of the Bachelor’s programme director, the three Master’s programme directors, the head of the Educational & Student Affairs (E&SA) department, the educational advisor and a student representative. This Board of Education handles a broad spectrum of policy matters including the content and organisation of the curricula , quality assurance, student affairs and student-related facilities.

For the development and execution of courses, the director of education ‘hires’ staff from the departments DOS, HCD and SDE.

Click here to view the faculty’s organisation chart.

Consultative Bodies

Board of Examiners
Faculty Student Council (FSC)
Board of Studies (known within the faculty as ‘OKIO’)
ID Education, a committee of the study association ID
Educational Advisory Committee, an external committee (OAC)

Education-Related Departments

The ESA department of the Faculty of IDE has three main tasks:

Informing, advising and supporting students during their studies in order to stimulate the intake, progress and outflow of students.
Supporting, advising and informing the teaching organisation in order to optimise the primary teaching process.
Contributing to the preparation, implementation and evaluation of the faculty’s policies on student affairs, education and the development of curricula.

In order to fulfil these core tasks, several task areas have been established:

Teaching coordination
IDE Course Support (IDE CS)
Teaching Regulations
Academic counselling
Educational Advisory team: for advice on didactics, assessment, online and blended learning
Quality assurance
Internationalisation
Internship coordination
Graduation support
Teaching capacity planning
Timetabling
Teaching board secretary’s office/Board of Examiners subcommittee

Click here for an overview of the ESA employees and their task area(s).

The Board of Examiners has statutory powers regarding the organisation and coordination of examinations and monitoring the quality of the examinations, in accordance with the Dutch Higher Education Act. The Board of Examiners is responsible for the appointment of examiners, the approval of the degree audit and the drafting and adoption of the Rules and Regulations concerning exams and assessments.

The Board of Examiners has delegated the day-to-day activities to an executive committee (small examination board (abbreviation KEC)), e.g. requests from students and lecturers regarding the regulations or exceptions from these, requests to grant the cum laude distinction to students who do not meet the requirements, and suspicions of fraud.

For reasons of efficiency and coherence, the faculty has opted for one single board of examiners on which the four degree programmes are represented.

The members of the Board of Examiners are appointed by the dean from the faculty’s academic staff. The board also includes a staff member from another TU Delft faculty in order to provide an external perspective on the quality assurance of examinations and assessments of the degree programme.

The Faculty Student Council (FSC) consists of seven students, chosen by the IDE students to represent them in discussions with the dean on educational and service-related matters. The task of the FSC is laid down in law. On some subjects, this body has right of consent. Find out more by visiting the FSC website.

The Industrial Design Engineering Board of Studies (In Dutch: Opleidingscommissie IO (abbreviation OKIO)) is a council consisting of five teachers and five students. The tasks of the OKIO are laid down in law. On some subjects, the OKIO has right of consent.

The OKIO:

Advises (provides solicited and unsolicited advice) on all educational topics within the programme
Advises or consent on the Teaching and Examination Regulations for the Bachelor’s (OER) and Master’s (TER) programmes
Conducts an annual evaluation of the execution of the OER/TER.

To find out more, visit the OKIO website.

The OAC is an external committee with several representatives from the professional Industrial Design Engineering field. The OAC meets with the dean and the director of education two or three times a year. It provides solicited and unsolicited advice on the educational strategy, education-related policies and on the four programmes.

ID Education is one of the study association’s committees and consists of the two education officers from the study association board, the five students from the OKIO and the students from the FSC. They discuss all kinds of education-related issues and collect input from students, which they then share with stakeholders within the faculty.

For more information, visit the ID Education website.

For each course, the Director of Education (in consultation with the department heads and the Board of Education) appoints a course coordinator. As course coordinator, you are responsible for both the content and organisation of a course. Your direct contact is the programme director of the degree programme to which your course belongs.

Each course has one course coordinator, who has at least the following responsibilities:

Coordinating the development of a course that delivers a high quality and engaging learning experience and fits the frameworks set by the Board of Education (final attainment levels, learning objectives, assessment, didactic concept, and budget).
Deciding on the content of the course, while respecting the specific responsibility of professors for the content of the components in their respective scientific fields.
Actively contributing to and maintaining the alignment of the content and organisation of the course with other courses in the degree programme.
Organising the provision of the course within the established budget constraints. This also includes taking care of aspects like the text in the study guide, the teaching schedule, timetabling, Brightspace material, the course manual, etc.
Ensuring the quality of the course by facilitating the evaluation activities planned by the Board of Education and the Board of Examiners and by taking the appropriate follow up actions.
Acting as an examiner for the course. To be allowed to fulfil the role of examiner, the Board of Examiners has stipulated that examiners must have teaching duties and have a University Teaching Qualification (UTQ) or equivalent.
Discussing the staffing of the course with the programme director and the responsible person at the department(s).
Managing the team of teachers involved in the course by:
- Informing the teachers about the course content, didactics, and deadlines, and ensuring their alignment to those.
- Providing input for the R&D interviews to the supervisors of the teachers in the course.
Acting as the point of contact regarding course-related matters for various people and groups (students, Board of Education, programme director, ID Education, staff departments, etc.) and communicating with them timely and clearly.
Be responsible for the construction of the assessments and for the determination of the results of these assessments.

The course coordinator must discuss any desired alterations/changes to the course (learning objectives, modes of instruction and/or assessment) with the relevant BSc- or MSc programme director and then submit these to the Board of Education for decision-making.

In most of the faculty’s courses, the course coordinator is assisted by a team of lecturers to teach the course.

Lecturers are appointed by the director of studies, on the recommendation of the course coordinator and in consultation with the departmental directors.

The course coordinator is responsible for the design and provision of a course, but will often ask several lecturers in their team to contribute ideas and to help with course development (the core team). Lecturers perform their teaching duties within the frameworks that have been developed for the course.

Depending on their personal knowledge and skills and on the type of teaching, lecturers fulfill one or more of the following roles/positions within a course:

Educational developer: This involves developing and implementing (part of) a course or curriculum.
Expert: This involves playing an active role in student supervision (either individual students or groups of students) regarding specific fields, by transferring knowledge, outlining required reading, making connections and demonstrating application possibilities within professional practice.
Coach: This involves supervising the learning process of individual students or groups of students by stimulating them to complete tasks and assignments proactively and independently and by giving advice and feedback on learning results.
Assessor: This involves designing exams and modes of assessment, conducting formative and/or summative assessments of the delivered final result and/or the demonstrated learning process and/or providing feedback on this assessment to the student.

Lecturers of a course can fulfill one or more of these roles. It is important that the students are aware of who is responsible for which role(s) in a particular course.

In many courses, student teaching assistants are used to help with the preparation, organisation and supervision.

When using student teaching assistants, it is important to pay attention to the following points:

A student teaching assistant must have a staff account. You should contact the secretary’s office for your department to arrange this. This ensures confidentiality and allows student teaching assistants to work in TU Delft systems such as Brightspace. A student teaching assistant can assist with the assessment of exams or submitted work, but only under supervision and with clear instructions for marking. Student teaching assistants are not allowed to process marks in Osiris.
When a student teaching assistant assists during an examination, regardless whether it takes place online or on campus, it is recommended that you remind them of the confidentiality provisions in their contract. In the case of online exams, you might not want student teaching assistants to be able to see the questions beforehand. You can control this by switching the student teaching assistant’s account settings to ‘student’ when preparing an exam.

As a member of the faculty’s academic staff, you can supervise MSc students in their MSc graduation project. Depending on your UFO profile and experience, you can act as chair (responsible supervisor) or mentor (supervisor).

A supervisory team consists of a chair and a mentor. The student is responsible for setting up the supervisory team. IDE supervisors are allocated 30 hours per student for supervision tasks.

The difference between a chair and a mentor is that the chair has a formal role in the procedures and administration of the graduation project. The administration is handled via the secretary’s office of the chair’s department.

Information about the expertise of staff members is available on the personal pages on the website. Make sure that the information is up-to-date.

More information is available in the graduation project manual.

As part of the Bachelor’s degree programme, IDE students can decide to do a minor internship (20 weeks; 30 ECTS). The students complete the internship at an internship company in the Netherlands or abroad.

For the minor internship, students are responsible for finding their own internship lecturer, from the pool of internship lecturers, who is willing to supervise them. The internship lecturer is expected to carry out the following activities:

At the start of the internship: conduct a 30-minute meeting on the internship and learning objectives.
Halfway through the internship: set aside 30 minutes of contact time (on the phone, via Skype or via email) to discuss the progress of the internship.
After the internship: assess the content of the report, discuss the report with the student afterwards and communicate an assessment (pass or fail) to the student and internship coordinator (two hours).

Following the internship lecturer’s assessment, an evaluation interview takes place between the student and the internship coordinator. Here, the student and the coordinator discuss the internship lecturer’s substantive assessment, the internship report and the student’s experiences, the learning objectives and the insights and feedback from the internship company.

The internship lecturer is allocated three hours per internship student in their personal teaching schedule. For more information on this topic, see the minor website and the manual for internship lecturers.

Master’s students can also do an internship as part of their elective space. The MSc internship has a student workload of 15 ECTS. The internship coordinator is the sole supervisor. The internship coordinator can be contacted at internshipoffice-IO@tudelft.nl.