Erdem Onan

Background  

Being part of the IDEE team on Students Taking Responsibility, Erdem will conduct educational research on, amongst others, what taking responsibility for learning means in an engineering education context. Erdem has a background in learning sciences, focusing on instructional design, technology enhanced learning, and self-regulated learning. Initially, Erdem focussed mostly on questions related to the use of technology in education to enhance learning. During both his MA and especially with his PhD project, Erdem developed a strong interest in the concept of self-regulated learning and (meta)cognitive processes, such as how people learn, retain information, and control their learning activities. He has, for instance, studied sources of student (de)motivation, identified possible barriers and facilitators of effective learning, and worked on the design of instructional manipulations to help students adopt effective learning strategies. 

Towards IDEE  

The way Erdem sees it, IDEE seamlessly connects to his earlier work and thus forms a wonderful next step. One phenomenon that Erdem has studied extensively is that of students’ reliance on learning strategies that are considered suboptimal for long-term learning and knowledge transfer (e.g., re-reading, highlighting, verbatim note-taking). This is often based on the erroneous belief that such strategies help them learn better than strategies that are empirically found more effective for students (e.g., retrieval practice, distributed practice, and interleaved practice). Erdem thoroughly enjoys investigating the causes of such educational misconceptions and what interventions can be used to correct them in order to improve students’ self-regulated learning. This ties in nicely with the theme of student responsibility. “For me, taking responsibility for your learning is self-regulated learning. It implies that you are an active learner, you take control of your thoughts, actions, and behaviour. That is my definition of self-regulated learning.”   

As part of IDEE  

One of the things that Erdem finds most appealing about IDEE is that IDEE focusses on TU Delft’s own educational landscape and practitioners. Through IDEE, Erdem will be able to feed his research directly into the educational practice of TU Delft, and this opens up the possibility of having a real impact on students. Having a lot of experience with educational psychology and experimental methodologies, a lot of Erdem’s research took place within controlled settings and the question remained whether or not it would get the chance to come into contact with authentic situations and actual educational practitioners. “The prospect of being able to make such an impact, to effect real change, is a strong motivation for me to pursue this line of research”.   

Did you know that ...? 

• Erdem works independently, but certainly not alone. He looks forward to collaborating with the other IDEE PDs and PhD candidates. Additionally, he is in good hands with his supervisors  Aleksandar Staničić and Serdar Așut. 

• Erdem is originally from Ankara, Turkey, but spent most of his time in higher education abroad. During his BA in Computer Education and Instructional Technologies, Erdem spent a year in Germany at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, where he followed courses on computer science, philosophy, and social sciences at the faculty of Informatics. For his MA in learning sciences, he went to Finland, where he studied at the Oulu University. This is where he was first introduced to the concept of self-regulated learning.  

• The TU Delft is not Erdem’s first Dutch University to do research at. Previously, Erdem spent one year as a research trainee at Radboud University, and he conducted his PhD project at Maastricht University.  

• Erdem is one of two Postdoc researchers who will consecutively conduct educational research on the IDEE theme Students Taking Responsibility. Want to know more about the other IDEE PDs and PhD candidates, and when they will join IDEE? You can find more information here.