According to Susan Lambriks, Professional Development Coordinator at TU/e’s service for personnel and organization, GoodHabitz currently offers approximately one hundred and twenty courses on its site. “In six different languages, and they continuously add new training courses,” she says. “We believe it’s important to stimulate our staff’s hunger for learning, and in our view, an accessible online platform such as GoodHabitz is perfectly suited for this purpose.”

GoodHabitz is a young and fast-growing international company with roots in Eindhoven. This, incidentally, is a coincidence: TU/e’s decision to make use of the company’s services was mostly based on the experiences other universities had with GoodHabitz, Lambriks says. “Apparently, there is a need for these kinds of online training courses, which, incidentally, should be considered complementary to ‘in-company’ trainings, for instance, and not a substitute. You can start with these courses where and whenever you want, which is a great advantage.” Many staff members might find the variety of English language modules particularly useful, she believes. “It’s an easy way to continue to improve your command of the English language.”

The training courses consist of a number of lessons, which in turn are composed of video’s, texts and quiz questions. The training usually concludes with a test to establish whether the user has actually learned something. The courses can be accessed via SURFconext. Staff members, obviously, are expected to make agreements with their superiors about use during working hours, Lambriks says.

Privacy

The university, incidentally, can’t see which staff members followed a training course, nor what the result was. “Privacy was important to us,” Lambriks emphasizes. “We had several experts look into it. We only get to see how many of our staff members followed which course, and how far they got with it. That hasn’t been broken down by target group, even though, in principle, that information would be interesting. But that simply couldn’t be arranged, that’s why we chose to play it safe, privacy-wise.”

Next year is a pilot. After that, the training courses may possibly become available for students as well.