Tjeerd Plomp, Colossal Figure in I.D., Dies at 83

By Alexander Romiszowski | Adjunct Associate Professor, IDD&E, Syracuse University

Tjeerd Plomp (June 20, 1938 — September 17, 2021), Professor Emeritus of Educational Science and Technology at the University of Twente, Netherlands, passed away on September 17, 2021. For the “younger” members of the IDD&E community, who did not get to know him personally, here are some recollections and basic facts. Tjeerd obtained his Ph.D. in Education in 1974 from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands). His thesis investigated individualized systems for mathematics education. This was my first, albeit “virtual”, contact, as my own Ph.D. dissertation, “A study of individualized systems for mathematics instruction at the post-secondary levels” (defended in 1977) was influenced by his earlier work. However, Tjeerd is best known to the IDD&E community for founding Twente University’s Department of Educational Science and Technology, known in Dutch as “Toegepaste Onderwijskunde” or “TO.”

When I joined IDD&E in 1986, I learned that Tjeerd and his colleagues at TO had in 1981 launched their Educational Science and Technology undergraduate program, “aided and abetted” by the faculty of the Instructional Technology program (now IDD&E) at Syracuse University (SU). Tjeerd spent time at SU in those years and is still remembered by alumni and faculty of that period.  Notable among the SU faculty was professor Don Ely, who spent whole semesters at TO, helping the faculty to Design the curriculum; Develop the courses; Implement and Evaluate the new program.

It was at that time that the Syracuse program changed its name from Instructional Technology to the current IDD&E. The official reason for the name change was that the word “technology” had been “kidnapped by the techies” so that the old name was no longer clearly understood as a process of applying science to solve instructional problems but rather as a set of products, like computers or videocams, used for instruction. But Don Ely told me that the name-change at SU was much influenced by interaction and collaboration with Tjeerd during the creation of the TO program.

 My own interaction and collaboration with Tjeerd started some two years later, when I spent the Fall 1988 semester at TO as a visiting professor helping to design, develop, and implement a more advanced IDD&E-type masters’ program to be offered at a distance to a worldwide target audience. This was the first of many such periods of academic interchange throughout the following years. One memorable assignment was as external reader of the Ph.D. thesis of Joseph Kessels. I recall this thesis (“Towards design standards for curriculum consistency in corporate education,” 1993) as a most interesting and well-structured academic read—and clearly influenced by Tjeerd’s advice and supervision.

Another reason for recalling this event is that this was my first experience of how a dissertation defense takes place in Dutch (and, I believe, many European) universities. The reading/assessment of the thesis and interaction with the student occurs earlier in a relatively informal, though rigorous, manner. The student already knows that s/he was successful before the “formal” defense—which is a theatrical occasion, full of pomp and circumstance, as illustrated by the photo of Tjeerd wearing his academic robes. Although this photo was not taken at a Dutch dissertation defense but in 2014 when Tjeerd was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Pretoria (South Africa), the splendor of the robes he wears is exactly what I remember from the event in Holland in 1993.

In addition to his work in Educational Technology, Tjeerd also performed other ground-breaking educational work. For example, as chair of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), he conducted research on student achievement in countries around the world. Also, since the early 1990s, he has been deeply involved in creating the emerging field of Educational Design Research. He has also been a frequent participant and keynote speaker at international conferences. This photo is from one of these occasions at Teachers College at Columbia University (NY) in 2013.

In addition to his work in Europe and North America, Tjeerd has contributed in many ways to educational research and development in the “Global South,” working on projects in countries such as Indonesia, Mozambique, and South Africa. My own last-but-one contact with Tjeerd was when he came to Brazil in 2018 as a keynote speaker at a conference of the Brazilian Association for Distance Education (ABED), invited specifically for his work on Educational Design Research. My last contact, described below, was at his home in Holland in 2020.

Since his time as Tjeerd’s Ph.D. student in the 1990’s, to his current role as Professor Emeritus at the University of Twente, Joseph Kessels has been a mutual friend—and it was Joseph who informed me personally of Tjeerd’s passing. I was taken aback, because in 2020 I had visited Tjeerd at his home near Arnhem and he seemed to be in good shape. While returning to U.K. from a consulting trip to Kazakhstan, I made a stopover in Holland, to visit my two Dutch friends—first Tjeerd, who met me at the rail station a mile from his house. He walked briskly back home—and I had difficulty keeping up. During the next hours as we chatted, Tjeerd occasionally was forgetful of past events, but otherwise, our conversation did not seem to indicate any major issues. But I now recall that as I was leaving to catch a train to visit Joseph Kessels in Amsterdam, Tjeerd’s wife, Emmy, escorted me to the door and told me, “Tjeerd is not really as well as the impression he tends to give.” She repeated a comment he made during dinner—a phrase which has since appeared in his obituary: “I don’t worry about the things I cannot do anymore, but rather I enjoy that which I still can do.”

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