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Erna Engelbrecht

TLS | IDEE Community 

Our programmes are evaluated for quality based on standardised indicators such as student grades, pass rates, options for upskilling educators, collaboration with other universities, etc. However, we are not looking at the impact. Using the Theory of Change, I help course teams get a closer look at the connection between resources and effort spent and short-, medium- and long-term outcomes that their courses or programmes lead to. This way, you can identify the nature of your programme's impact and identify points for improvement. Important here is to evaluate the process, not the people!

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Background

Erna Engelbrecht is a learning developer at TLS and a PhD candidate in engineering education (ABE) affiliated with 4TU.CEE and LDE-CEL. She has a background in Social Science and Humanities. For her PhD, Erna developed a framework for evaluating educational innovations and is also working on a framework for programme evaluation. Both frameworks approach evaluation as a form of research, promoting the idea of scholarship in engineering education. The framework for evaluating innovation focuses more on making your own teaching achievements visible. Programme evaluation, on the other hand, is a completely different ballgame.

Towards IDEE 

When the call for IDEE went out, Erna felt an intuitive preference for the IDEE theme of Future Engineering Skills: “When mentioning the need to teach transferable skills such as verbal communication and writing skills, I occasionally hear people saying that there is no space for this in engineering education, because we are not teaching social science. However, with my background in Social Science and Humanities, I never attended a class where the teacher announced that today we are going to learn how to write, or today we will learn how to work in groups. Teaching these skills should be embedded in the curriculum. We should not replace domain-related content. Instead, students should learn transferable skills as a result of having received an education in the domain of their choice.”   

As part of IDEE 

Erna initially joined IDEE because of her own experience as a PhD. The focus of the university is on technology and the faculty Graduate School programmes are geared towards that. “It was a bit of a struggle to create a space for my own work in this. We also saw from the education inspection that the mentoring programme at TU Delft is lacking. For this reason, I volunteered to mentor the IDEE PhDs and help build a sense of community amongst the early career researchers. IDEE PhDs will definitely benefit from the fact that we have a great team of people who aim to improve education together, and we can now enrol for ICO courses as well. However, it is still important for the PhD to have someone to help them find their feet, and to navigate the personal journey they go through while being part of such an initiative.”  

Did you know that…?

  • Erna designed the first MOOC for the University of Pretoria on the topic of “Academic Skills”.
  • Erna is a member of the Works Council (“Ondernemingsraad).
  • Erna is the PhD representative for TU Delft on the ENHANCE Advisory Assembly.