Abstract:

This paper presents the design, development, application and evaluation of a massive, open, online course (MOOC) on YouTube with the main aim to ‘revitalize’ the nature of science in useful contextualized knowledge integrating key-interests of ordinary citizens, not just scientists. The aspects of the nature of science need to emerge by re-shaping the image of science that is usually harsh and rigid. Presenting science content accompanied by aspects of the nature of science as something useful and understandable, is a first step to create an image of science that is interacting, shaping and developing into its social, political, economic and cultural background.

The developed MOOC is named “ATLAS MOOC – ENJOY SCIENCE" and mainly contains multimodal educational and informative material, providing a collaborative and interactive environment for participants. ATLAS MOOC backbone is a series of short films for science education that seek to portray and present abstract concepts and theories of nature of science in a creative and original way. ATLAS MOOC lasts for 12 weeks for anyone who wish to attend it. Its first aim is to provide a friendly and enjoyable online environment for teaching and learning science and to be a focal point for meetings, communication and collaboration between teachers, children, teenagers, citizens and researchers in science education.

ATLAS MOOC aims to:
a) provide a meeting point between citizens, students, pre- and in-service teachers and researchers in science teaching for collaboration and learning,
b) discuss about the nature of science in open, friendly and interactive communication,
c) produce educational material about science concepts and phenomena situated in their socio-cultural background,
d) re-contextualize the content of nature of science.

The content, the structure and the function of MOOC are analyzed during a six months university course for pre-service teachers.

Methodological tools for speech, image, sound, multimodality and online diffusion are used in order to analyze: content focusing mainly on short films, questionnaires, discussions, interactions and group work of the participants as well as ATLAS MOOC traffic and demographics.

Keywords:

MOOCs, web-based learning environments, science education, nature of science.