That MOOCs attract students to study programmes is only one of several positive aspects. The opportunity to collaborate with various societal stakeholders is another. For several years, the IIIEE has collaborated with international organisations to develop course material for the MOOCs. Collaborations have involved the United Nations, the World Wide Fund for Nature and universities in other countries, among others.
The next step could be to produce online courses together with companies. One global giant has already been in touch.
‟This company contacted Coursera, the platform which hosts our MOOCs, and Coursera contacted us. The company wants to produce an online course for its employees together with us”, says Charlotte Leire, who is responsible for the IIIEE’s massive open online courses (MOOCs) together with Kes McCormick.
Higher education and teaching are undergoing a paradigm shift in which development is increasingly happening online. And this change is rapid, accelerated by the pandemic. In 2012, Stanford University launched Coursera as a platform for online university courses; since then, the platform has grown to become the world’s largest purveyor of education.
‟With the pandemic, the number of visitors to our MOOCs more than doubled and just over three times as many students complete the courses as before the pandemic”, says Charlotte Leire.
A complement to traditional teaching
The IIIEE does not see traditional teaching and massive open online courses as two opposite poles in competition with each other. On the contrary, the MOOCs are a complement that can contribute to traditional teaching. For example, videos included in a MOOC can be used in the classroom. Currently, the videos on Coursera are automatically translated into seven or eight languages.
‟This opens up unimagined opportunities. Just imagine when everyone can benefit from online teaching regardless of which language they master”, says Kes McCormick.
A way of reaching out
At the IIIEE, the MOOCs are more than just teaching. They are a way of influencing, of reaching out to hundreds of thousands of people and making the Institute known, while showing what it can contribute on sustainability issues. The IIIEE has identified three categories of applicants to the MOOCs: students, professionals wishing to develop their skills or change careers, and the interested general public.
‟Regardless of the target group, only a small proportion of them complete a whole MOOC. But our impact can be equally important on those who don’t complete the courses as on those who do”, says Kes McCormick, continuing:
‟Nowadays, impact and outreach can determine whether a researcher gets EU funding to finance a project, for example. MOOCs are a fantastic way of reaching out worldwide.”
Students have been critical
From the students’ side, there has been some criticism of massive open online courses. The criticism mainly focused on the risk that traditional campus teaching would be deprived if its funding is redirected to finance online courses. A reasonable reaction, but not a logical one, according to Kes McCormick.
‟The vast majority of the money to develop the MOOCs comes from research grants and external funding bodies, not from the traditional education budget”, he says.
"Embrace the MOOCs"
Swedish universities, including Lund University, should work strategically on MOOCs and embrace them in a completely different way than they currently do, thinks Kes McCormick. Not least because he considers the online courses as a given element of lifelong learning. Unless you have a strategy in place, there is a high risk of being overtaken by other universities such as Stanford, Melbourne and MIT, which are in a league of their own in terms of online courses as compared to Swedish universities, according to Kes McCormick.
‟Educational possibilities online are enormous and we have barely scraped the surface. Universities that don’t keep up will miss out on a gigantic opportunity”, he says.
Written by Jan Olsson jan [dot] olsson [at] kommunikation [dot] lu [dot] se
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
We offer five MOOCs which are all part of the Greening the Economy series. These courses are open for everyone and free of charge.
- “Greening the Economy: Lessons from Scandinavia” - How can we live a good life on one planet with over seven billion people?
- “Greening the Economy: Sustainable Cities” - How can we shape our urban development towards sustainable and prosperous futures?
- “Circular Economy: Sustainable Materials Management” - How can we create a circular economy through sustainable materials management?
- “Urban Nature: Connecting Cities, Nature and Innovations” - How can we work with nature to design and build our cities?
- “Sharing Cities: Governance and Urban Sustainability” - How can we govern the sharing economy in our cities?