Introductory course
A free five-week course on how to do good effectively. You'll learn to compare interventions, reason under uncertainty, and prioritise between problems. You'll graduate with a concrete plan for your career and your giving.
Why this matters
You're here because you want to do good. Most people do. But wanting to help isn't enough. You also have to work out how to help effectively.
That's harder than it sounds. The world is complex, our intuitions often mislead us, and good intentions sometimes produce bad outcomes. The gap between a mediocre intervention and an excellent one can be enormous: not 10% better, but 10 or 100 times better.
Effective altruism is the project of working out how to do the most good, and then actually doing it. This course gives you the practical skills for that.
Who this course is for
People who are driven to optimise. You're comfortable making hard trade-offs, and willing to make real personal sacrifices to help others, including distant ones: animals, people on the other side of the world, people who don't exist yet.
You're analytical and open-minded, you enjoy thinking hard about things, and you're willing to take unconventional problems seriously. You already want to make a difference through your career, your giving and your politics. You're just not certain how to get the most out of what you have, and you'd rather work from evidence than from instinct.
We built it for people developing career capital in the areas where careful thinking compounds: policy and politics, organisation building, communicating ideas, research, and deep expertise in a pressing problem. You'll get the most out of it if you arrive with a real decision in mind: a career move you're weighing up, a giving budget you want to allocate better, or a project you're deciding whether to start.
If you like reading philosophy, building spreadsheets, and getting things done in the real world, you'll be in good company. Big hearts and bigger spreadsheets.
An excellent course that inspired me to delve deeper into the greatest challenges of our time and how I can contribute to addressing them effectively. The rational approach, combined with space for open, critical discussions within an inspiring group, made it particularly valuable.
Roy Hagemann
Co-CEO Impact Academy
Does any of this actually work?
It's a fair question to ask before committing five weeks. In 2023 Scott Alexander added up what the effective altruism movement had actually produced in 15 years, on the argument that you should judge it by its outputs rather than by the arguments swirling around it.
His tally: roughly 200,000 lives saved, mostly from malaria. 25 million cases of chronic parasite infection treated. Clean drinking water for 5 million people. 400 million chickens moved out of cages and 500,000 pigs out of crates. A few hundred donated kidneys. And most of the early work on AI safety, years before it was a mainstream concern.
Those are movement-wide figures over more than a decade, not ours, and they were counted by someone sympathetic to the movement. You don't have to accept the whole worldview to take them seriously, and you shouldn't take them on trust either. Learning to check numbers like these yourself is most of what this course is for.
Skills you'll build
Reason transparently
Make your thinking visible, so others can engage with it, challenge it, and help you improve it.
Measure impact
Use frameworks like QALYs, DALYs and WELLBYs to compare interventions, and evaluate charity recommendations critically.
Reason under uncertainty
Not everything can be measured. Learn expected value reasoning, calibration and forecasting, so thin evidence doesn't stop you acting.
Prioritise between problems
Apply the ITN framework (importance, tractability, neglectedness) to work out where your effort could matter most.
Make a plan for your impact
Turn all of it into concrete intentions for your career, your giving, your political voice, and your role in helping others do the same.
What you'll do each week
Meet your cohort and learn the habit everything else builds on: making your reasoning visible. You'll practise stating your claims, your confidence, and the evidence behind them, so others can challenge your thinking and help you improve it.
How do you compare a bednet to a cash transfer? You'll work with QALYs, DALYs and WELLBYs, see how far the best interventions outperform the average, and evaluate real charity recommendations critically.
Some of the most important problems have the least evidence. You'll practise expected value reasoning, calibrate your own forecasts, and learn how to act sensibly when the numbers run out.
Apply the ITN framework (importance, tractability, neglectedness) to compare cause areas: global health and development, animal welfare, and global catastrophic risks. You'll work out where your own effort could go furthest.
Bring it together in a short presentation: the problem you've chosen, your career plan, your giving intention, and how you'll use your political voice. Your group gives you feedback to sharpen your thinking before you act on it.
How we designed this course
This course is built on research into what actually works in education. We have drawn particularly on self-determination theory, a well-supported model of how people develop motivation that lasts.
It identifies three needs. Autonomy: your actions should follow from your own values, not guilt or pressure. Competence: you should feel capable, not overwhelmed. Relatedness: you should feel you belong. A meta-analysis of 223,209 students found that self-determined motivation has large effects on engagement, effort and enjoyment. A second review of 79,000 students found that supporting these three needs explains roughly 30-40% of the variance in it.
That is why the course is built around practical skills with feedback rather than lectures, why each week connects back to your own values and goals, and why you work in a small cohort rather than alone. Each week targets one skill, you practise it in low-stakes exercises, and in week 5 you do the real thing and get feedback on it.
How does this course work?
Groups consist of 4-8 participants, with whom you will meet up weekly online for 5 weeks to discuss the articles read during the previous week.
Our course runs every quarter, and when we reach out to confirm your participation, you can simply choose to join the following cohort if the upcoming one does not suit your schedule. Thus, the next course dates are:
- 5 October - 2 November 2026
- Applications close 27 September 2026
The time investment is approximately 3.5 hours per week:
- Weekly sessions of 1 hour and 15 minutes
- Based on your preference, weekly sessions take place on either:
- Monday 17:30 - 18:45
- Monday 19:30 - 20:45
- Thursday 17:30 - 18:45
- Thursday 19:30 - 20:45
- Weekly reading and other course materials for 2 hours
Contact us if these timings don't work. We can try hosting a session on a different day/time.
Each week you'll read the background material, take a short quiz to check your understanding, and complete an exercise that builds that week's skill. The group session is a workshop rather than a seminar: you share what you've produced and help each other improve it, so come with your exercises done.
Note that our course is for people living in or connected to the Netherlands. If you live abroad, or would like to start sooner, you can sign up for an earlier cohort of the international virtual program here.
Meet your facilitators
Our courses are facilitated by dedicated members of the community. In addition to our regular volunteers, we are grateful to have several wonderful individuals who contribute by hosting courses on a more occasional basis.
James Herbert
Co-Director
Marieke de Visscher
Co-Director
Erwin Rossen
Facilitator Introductory Course
Ricardo van Mildert
Facilitator, trainer, coach, speaker and EAGx content manager
Tom Luken
Facilitator Introductory Course
Where this leads
Participants have gone on to work in government, start organisations, do research at universities, lead teams at high-impact nonprofits, and redirect significant resources to effective causes. Some made large career changes. Others found ways to have more impact in the path they were already on.
Five weeks is where you meet people. The rest of EAN is where you keep working with them: local groups across the Netherlands, a co-working space in Amsterdam, and EAGxAmsterdam, one of the largest EA conferences in Europe.
Upcoming course
Harness the power of reason and evidence to maximise your positive impact on the world through our comprehensive, effective altruism introductory course.
Dates
October 5, 2026 - November 2, 2026
Duration
5 weeks
Location
Online / in-person
Workload
3.5 hours per week
Price
Free (application based)
Ready to apply?
You don't need to already agree with us. You'll disagree with some of the readings, and the sessions are built to make that disagreement productive. Come with a decision you're weighing up, and leave with a plan you've stress-tested against people who will tell you where it's weak.