A second session of the MOOC “Basics in Epidemiology of Animal and Zoonotic Diseases” in French and English will take place from November 4th to December 13th, 2019 on the FUN Platform. This is a free online training course of 6 consecutive weeks, requiring approximately 4 hours of work per week, consisting of 6 chapters with more than 30 videos and additional resources, which are available online and downloadable. […]
Tag: MOOCs
Profile: Stephen Downes
By Steven Blum, copywriter ICWE
When Stephen Downes and George Siemens, a pair of Canadian academics, began building the world’s first massive open online course (or MOOC) back in 2008, they weren’t exactly expecting massive success. “We thought maybe twenty people would show up,” Downes recently told me. They ended up with 2,200 virtual students— a then-massive amount. Thankfully the course, which explored connectivist […]
“MOOCs – a must, not a luxury”
With the launch of the Knowledge Bank, Egypt has established itself as an African leader in open education. No surprise then that the subject of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) should be coming in for close scrutiny in Cairo. Dr Zeinab El Maadawi, an Associate Professor and Expert in eLearning and International Education Management at the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, has been studying […]
The underlying inequality of MOOCs
Anybody who has been paying any small amount of attention to educational headlines in the past few years will be well rehearsed in the proposed benefits of MOOCs. A cursory online search will provide you with endless news articles, blog posts, TED talks and accompanying comments that cite the reasons why MOOCs, enabling global access to Ivy League-standard education, are the biggest thing to shake up […]
OERs and MOOCs: Old Wine in New Skins?
There has been a growing buzz about the concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how they will transform education around the world. OER has been the subject of increased attention globally, with many donor-funded projects (most often led by universities) providing space to experiment with different models of openness and research the educational effect that these might […]
Johannes Cronje: an academic leader goes back to the bottom of the education ladder
Johannes Cronje is a keynote speaker at the upcoming eLearning Africa Conference. As the Dean of the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, when he began teaching a MOOC he wanted to do it the right way. Not content with assuming traditional teaching methods would translate to an online platform, he went back to school: enrolling himself in […]
The unsung local heroes who are really changing Africa
A revolution is occurring throughout African societies. While governments implement high-level, high-visibility ICT strategies, experts have recently identified far more radical, hidden changes occurring across the Continent. New technologies, when adopted, are adapted to local needs: a sort of under-the-radar innovation which is now pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
