In 2014 UNESCO named massive open online courses (MOOC) as one of the 30 prospective tendencies for developing education up to 2028. Today open courses can be found across the world for practically any internet user’s search.
The MOOC format can be considered to have been accepted at the government level with the opening of the national platform Open Education in September 2015, putting forth massive open online course as a new element of the system of higher education in Russia.
Why did the initiative from Stanford University to place online courses in open access resonate so well and interest even state governments? Most likely because it was a chance to show the worthiness of national education to an unlimited number of people from different countries around the world with different interests and levels of education, which forms the “brand” of specific universities.
At South Ural State University the formation of courses in this new format is also one of the key goals reflected in the Road Map for the university’s development.
According to the leader of the Project for Creating MOOC at SUSU, Lilia Kostyleva, without the 5-100 program it would be much more difficult to move forward the creation of online courses. The financing of this program allowed our team to complete education with specialists from the Lectorium company and sign a contract with them for the development of a pilot course.
“This year in February in Saint Petersburg,” says L. Kosyleva, “filming has already begun of lectures from doctor of technical sciences, professor Irina Kirpichnikova in the course Renewable Energy Sources, which we are planning to release in September. We really hope that putting forth questions about the ecological and energy crises as well as their recommended paths to fixing them will attract the attention of a wide audience.”
To try and popularize this new educational format at SUSU, a MOOC development contest was opened for which there 19 applications. The competitors completed training at the SUSU MOOC School where they got to know the keys to preparing and maintaining massive open online courses.9 of the writing teams got to the final. The results of the competition will be announced soon. The best projects will be financed by the university.
Simultaneously the university is working hard on implementing hardware and software and supporting the staff of the MOOC laboratory where test lectures from the competitors have already been filmed.
“MOOC will become an integral part of the university’s affairs,” believes L. Kostyleva, “so we are waiting for interesting and unique ideas from teachers, and the project team will do everything they can to bring them to life.”
Today, we can already say with confidence that our teachers have a real chance to test themselves as authors of modern courses in a new format and as an internet-teacher with an unbelievably large audience.
Photo: Oleg Igoshin