Welcome & course overview
Welcome
We’re glad you’re here!
Effective Altruism Netherlands is a charity dedicated to building a community of people trying to figure out how to do the most good — and then actually doing it. We run educational programmes like this one, support local organisers across the country, host a co-working space in Amsterdam, and organise EAGxAmsterdam, one of Europe’s largest EA conferences.
But our work is really about people. The people you’ll meet in this course — your cohort, your facilitator, and the wider Dutch EA network — are here because they share something with you: the belief that we can do a lot of good if we think carefully about how.
People who’ve taken this course have gone on to work in government, start organisations, conduct research at top universities, lead teams at high-impact nonprofits, and redirect significant resources to effective causes. Some made big career changes; others found ways to have more impact in the paths they were already on. What they share is that they thought carefully about how to do good — and then acted on it.
This course is designed to give you practical skills and connect you with people who can help you along the way. By the end, you’ll have a plan for increasing your impact — through your career, your giving, your political voice, and your role in helping others do the same. And you’ll have a community to support you as you act on it.
Let’s get started.
What you’ll learn
This course teaches practical skills for doing good more effectively. By the end, you’ll be able to:
Reason transparently — Start making your thinking visible so others can engage with it, challenge it, and help you improve it. (Week 1)
Measure impact — Use frameworks like QALYs, DALYs, and WELLBYs to compare interventions. Evaluate charity recommendations critically. (Week 2)
Reason under uncertainty — Not everything can be measured and sometimes there isn’t great evidence about what we should do, but that doesn’t need to stop us from acting. We’ll teach you the skills to deal with this: expected value reasoning, calibration, and forecasting. (Week 3)
Prioritise between problems — Apply the ITN framework (importance, tractability, neglectedness) to identify where your efforts could matter most. (Week 4)
Make a plan for your impact — Develop concrete intentions for your career, your giving, your political voice, and your role as a multiplier. (Week 5)
These skills build on each other. Reasoning transparency underpins everything else — you can’t evaluate a charity or prioritise between problems without showing your working. Measuring impact gives you tools for Week 4’s prioritisation. And your final impact plan draws on everything you’ve learned.
Along the way, you’ll learn about cause areas that effective altruists tend to prioritise:
Global health and development — Improving lives in the global south through proven interventions
Animal welfare — Reducing the suffering of animals, particularly in factory farming
Global catastrophic risks — Preventing events like pandemics, nuclear war, or AI disasters that could cause massive harm. You might prioritise these for near-term reasons (protecting people alive today) or long-term reasons (protecting humanity’s future).
Longtermism — The view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority. This includes work on catastrophic risks, but also work on making good futures even better — like ensuring advanced AI has good values, improving how major decisions get made, or safeguarding options for future generations.
But the goal isn’t just to know about these areas — it’s to develop the skills to evaluate them yourself and decide where you can contribute most.
How the course works
Each week, you’ll:
Read — Background material to give you the knowledge you need (45-90 mins)
Quiz — Multiple-choice questions on Circle to check your understanding (~5-10 mins)
Practise — Exercises that develop the week’s skill (30-60 mins)
Discuss — A group session to share your work and get feedback (75 mins)
The discussion isn’t a seminar where you talk about ideas. It’s a workshop where you share what you’ve produced and help each other improve. Come prepared with your exercises completed.
In Week 5, you’ll bring everything together in a presentation: your chosen problem, your career plan (or career advising application), your giving intention, and your plans for advocacy and multiplying. Your group will give you feedback to sharpen your thinking before you act on it.
A note on how we’ve designed this course
This course is built on research into what actually works in education. We’ve drawn particularly on self-determination theory (SDT), a well-supported model from psychology that explains how people develop sustainable motivation.
SDT identifies three basic psychological needs. When these are supported, people become genuinely motivated; when they’re neglected, people either disengage or burn out.
The three needs are:
Autonomy — Feeling that your actions align with your values, not that you’re being pressured or guilted into them
Competence — Feeling capable of achieving your goals, not overwhelmed or helpless
Relatedness — Feeling connected to others and like you belong, not isolated or judged
The evidence for the power of SDT is compelling. A meta-analysis of 223,209 students found self-determined forms of motivation have very large effects on engagement (r = .57), effort (r = .51), and enjoyment (r = .56). Effects on objectively measured academic performance are small but reliable (r = .1). Furthermore, it looks like we can build those ‘autonomous’ types of motivation by supporting psychological needs. Another meta-analysis of 79,000 students found that the level of ‘psychological need support’ explains about 30–40% of the variance in autonomous motivation. This is 3 to 4 times the size of a ‘large’ effect in psychology.
That’s why this course focuses on practical skills with feedback (competence), connects everything to your own values and goals (autonomy), and embeds you in a cohort and community (relatedness).
Evidence-based teaching has informed us how on how we try to teach you the skills you need:
Work backwards from skills — Each week targets a specific skill, not just knowledge. You’ll practise reasoning transparently, evaluating charities, making forecasts, and prioritising problems.
Assess through doing — In Week 5, you’ll present your impact plan. This isn’t a test — it’s a chance to do the real thing and get feedback.
Build up with formative activities — Each week’s exercises are designed to help you practise components of the final skill in a low-stakes environment. You get feedback as you go, so you’re not learning everything at once in Week 5.
Provide knowledge that supports practice — The readings aren’t just background. They give you what you need to do the exercises well.
Learn from role models — Your facilitator and the wider EAN community are here to support you, not judge you.