Getting started > Welcome to the course > Welcome to the course
- Hello there! Wherever you are in the world, we welcome you very much to this course.
- We, the three of us, are your course team! I am Alexander de Haan.
- For many years already I am teaching an elaborate off-line version of this course on the Delft University of Technology campus for well over three hundred students each year.
- I have a broad interest in education, developed many different courses and taught at many different institutions, both universities as well as commercial companies.
- In this online course I will introduce you to new analytical techniques in this course using situations, animations and examples.
- I have been in Alexander’s course as a student a few years ago.
- I worked on an elaborate evaluation of the first online version of this course.
- Currently I am involved as a student assistant, organizing the off line on campus version of this course and supervising students in their group work.
- My role in this online course is providing you in each video with clear day to day examples of the analytical techniques Alexander introduces.
- For more than five years I have been working with Alexander in the on campus version of this course, by organizing it and supervising students.
- My role in this course is to help you apply the techniques introduced in each video to a case so you learn them faster.
- Over the years we have seen everybody who starts with this course making comparable mistakes.
- In this video we give you a quick overview of how the course works.
- All three of us, of course, wish you a very useful and pleasant time.
- When you have enrolled in this course via EdX, take a look at the top bar in your screen.
- Here you see all the important resources for this course.
- Starting from left to right, you see courseware, course info, facebook, literature: solving complex problems, glossary, discussion and progress.
- The progress page shows you your progression in the course.
- The discussion page is categorized; it gives an overview of all the discussion topics of the course.
- The glossary provides the definitions of commonly used terms and concepts in the course.
- It is our experience that working together makes this course so much easier and more fun to do.
- In the course info we post updates and other news about the course.
- You can see that the course is divided in five steps.
- At the end of every video Elianne introduces some questions that guide you in applying the course content on a case.
- They experience their problems as we speak and you can really make a contribution to solving their complex problem by working on it in this course.
- We have selected these five cases for you, but you can apply the content of this course on any case you like.
- Maybe you have a situation in your work, your country or your private life you want to analyse and solve using the techniques of this course.
- You discuss your work and the questions you have on the discussion fora and on facebook.
- The content of this course is described more elaborately and very practically in the book called Solving Complex Problems.
- It is not necessary for this course to have the book, but it will of course be an advantage to have more elaborate reading material and examples available.
- The only way to learn a course like this is to try and apply.
- We have provided you with some cases in this course.
- We are really looking forward to work with you in this course.
- If you, just like us, can’t wait, go check out the course site.
Getting started > Cases to practise > Case Schiphol
One of the leading and most innovative airports in the world.
At the airport we are dealing with ongoing growth and we are planning a new terminal at the moment.
I am looking for new ideas and innovative solutions from a new generation of students who are doing this course.
Currently I am doing a project at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol about the arriving experience of passengers.
So what actors might be important here? Think for instance about the airport itself, the airlines or the airport security.
Getting started > Cases to practise > Case electrical vehicles
- One of the major questions the government is faced with is ‘how environmentally friendly is an electric car?’ And that of course depends upon the questions ‘where does the electricity come from?’ From coal? From solar? From wind.
- Why should the Dutch government subsidize electric cars, when there are alternatives that are also environmentally friendly? And what is the innovation potential of the traditional car.
- Maybe thanks to the introduction of the electric car there will be strong incentives for the producers of the traditional cars to improve the environmental performance of their cars.
- Those questions make it extremely difficult for the Dutch government to decide about the question ‘what to do?’ And my simple question to you is ‘get me out of here!’ Give me a clear picture of what the problem is.
Getting started > Cases to practise > Case strategy studies
- To what extent are the different risks covered, e.g., on employment or poverty? How are the different systems build to distribute resources and to provide services? And how do they differ in terms of achievements and outcomes, in particular, e.g., with respect to life expectancy? As you can imagine, this involves a broad diversity of actors as well as a broad diversity of perspectives and objectives.
- What are the different actors that you think should be included in our analysis? What are their perspectives and their different dilemmas? What are the different tensions that you could think of? And then, could you come up with a well-balanced set of criteria that you think we should include in our analysis for the welfare states research project? Finally, considering that the context would be that of economic crises and rising individualism that threaten the sustainability of the welfare states, could you come up with a number of alternatives in your presentation of the findings.
Getting started > Cases to practise > Case burger restaurant
- I am here, with my restaurant, Pure Funky Burgerz.
- Why don’t you come with me? So here at Burgerz we do about 24 different burgers, ranging from beef, chicken, lamb, vegetarian, but now also vegan.
- All the ingredients we use come from local farms within a 100 kilometers.
- So let me show you, these are our salads, and, as I said before, we do vegetarian burgers, for example our pumpkin burger or our mushroom burger.
- I want to serve real, pure hamburgers from a full service restaurant.
- I want to run a successful restaurant based on these principles.
- Come up with ideas and suggestions on what I can do.
Getting started > Cases to practise > Case Nile
- I am Bert Enserink and I am a policy analist at Delft University of Technology, and I am involved in policy making in the river Nile.
- Many people are dependent on the water of the Nile, for their livelihood, for drinking water, for sanitation, for industrial purposes, for energy generation.
- It is a very complex and political sensitive issue.
- The Nile is a very complex river system as you discovered.
- Others want to build this dam for irrigation systems to raise new crops and improve the agricultural system.
- If I need to facilitate the policy process, then I need to know what are the real concerns and issues in this river basin.
- What do these people want? So I need to know, not the solutions, building a dam, or building an irrigation system, but what are the issues that need to be solved.
- The causal diagram, the systems diagram, the problem diagram, and try to get some grip on the issues that are important to the stakeholders in this system.
Getting started