Abstract:

The UPV/EHU (University of the Basque Country) Summer Courses are held in San Sebastián (Spain), celebrating this year the 31rst edition with more than 100 face-to-face activities, such as courses, seminars, congresses, international meetings, schools, professional conferences and workshops. These open educational activities offer an up-to date and diverse programme. Specifically, in each of the last two editions, more than 1000 national and international lecturers participated and more than 8000 students attended them. In addition, throughout the 10 weeks that Summer Courses last, some activities are broadcasted daily by live video streaming. As a result, at the end of each edition several hundreds of hours of academic video recording are available.
To take advantage of the generated materials as well as to reach out to a larger population, we have set up a pilot experience where some selected summer courses have been adapted to be offered in online format exclusively.
In this paper we propose a model to design online courses based on academic videos. The proposal suggests 2, 4 or 6 weeks long courses, with scheduled activities and a dedication by the student of 7-8 hours per week. The model has been used, evaluated and adjusted four times in the last two winters. In the pilot experience, 151 students took part in the resulting four courses and the average satisfaction rate was 7.8 (on a rating scale from 1 to 10). Not only the experience has validated the proposed model, but also it has shown the viability to develop courses in the new format. Moreover, the model can be used to develop a wide range of online courses like continuous professional educational courses, professional competence courses or master courses.

Keywords:

Video based e-learning, lifelong learning, continuous education, professional educational.