Abstract:

Since October 2016, Técnico Lisboa from the University of Lisbon (tecnico.ulisboa.pt), has been positioning itself in the landscape and latest developments of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) with pedagogic and design strategies that take into account both the Portuguese and International Higher Education contexts in the areas known as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). The sixteen online courses produced so far are developed through multidisciplinary collaboration between our teaching staff community and the MOOC development team. Tutors, instructional designers, graphic designers and video editors, begin to ideate and design the STEM content according to the pedagogical model of each project. This includes online courses available at different levels of education: Bridging courses on basic sciences and technology, Graduate courses on topics from 1st and 2nd cycles of higher education, and Extracurricular courses on transversal topics from STEM fields of study (courses.mooc.tecnico.ulisboa.pt). All online courses are in Portuguese and/or English and can include transcripts and texts from other languages. Each MOOC Técnico course has a planned duration of 4 to 5 weeks corresponding to a workload of 6 to 8 hours per week (circa 1.5 ECTS per MOOC). The MOOC Técnico courses allow different forms of assessment: Quizzes, Peer review, and Formative assessment, that enable an enrolled participant to earn a free Honor certificate. More than 14,000 participants, students from IST, alumni and external learners, are presently enrolled in the platform.

The multimedia solutions for contents, mainly short and medium-length educational videos, are worked out by the team in order to make it clear, visually stimulating, and have the correct technical and content specifications to be launched in the Open edX platform, where it will be made available. Our evolutionary process of designing a MOOC Técnico course begins with teaching staff or a startup team proposal to produce an online course with the pedagogic characteristics previously described. During the pre-production, teachers and tutors work together with the team in order to produce attractive storyboards that are carefully revised and validated. After the scientific validation from the tutors, the audio-video attractive material is recorded in the Técnico Lisboa studio. In our paper, we’ll give examples on how to produce and design innovative MOOCs, one per each type of MOOC: a bridging course on “Markov Matrices” directed at Maths Highschool students, a graduate online course on “Epigenetics and Human Health” aimed at students from the BioMedical and BioEngineering areas, and a transversal MOOC on “Circular Economy”. We hope by sharing our knowledge experience, that teaching staff, startup teams, and instructional designers, who develop and research course material for their Higher Education learning programs can identify value in our processes and creative techniques and support them in their future course development targeted at a broader audience.

Keywords:

MOOC design and production, STEM online courses, video storyboards, attractive educational videos.