Our university National University of Singapore has offered MOOC – Massive Open Online Courses on two platforms on edX ( https://www.edx.org/school/nus) and Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/nus). The courses are from different schools and faculties and are offered for free to all. I believe the courses were selected or have some process of approval procedure to publish on the platforms.
Challenge faced: Staff may have to get the consent from the university if they want to their course open to public.
I work in a human genetics laboratory and teach students with their experiments, such as exploring telomere length changes associated with mindfulness. We need to use multiple equipment. Physical, face to face classes would be the first choice, but during pandemic, we need to prepare online video for them.
Advantage apparently would be, they can access to learning at any time any where. The disadvantage is also obvious, they could not see the real experiment with the actual equipment run when experiment is carried out.
What I would post for my course: I would show them the useful protocols, shared my experiences and tips of the experiments and trouble shooting skills.
Who would be interested in my course? The answer is those professionals in similar field. Students who have projects to complete might be interested, but as they have limited experience in the lab, they might have difficulty to learn online. They may want to get the answers directly from the teacher instead of finding out the solutions by themselves. Researchers in the molecular genetic field might be more interested than the students, especially when their experiment did not turn out as expected. For those who are not in this field and with no genetic background, these courses will be too difficult for them to understand.
In the online MOOC platforms which ONL topic 2 introduced, I like EdX the most. High quality of online courses from >160 leading member university, such as MIT, Harvard etc. are accessed freely. I quickly enrolled one course and started my journey of online learning.
Technology in the open education is important, people not only use their computer, but also use their smartphone, tablet, laptops to learn at any where any time when they are free. Numbers of tools created for the educator to use for their teaching. Our facilitator C summarized the presentation tools for us to share our work and process of conduction our work. Here are the examples.
- Biteable https://biteable.com/
- Powtoon https://www.powtoon.com/
- Canva www.canva.com
- Miro www.miro.com
- Padlet www.padlet.com
- Flipgrid www.flipgrid.com
- Articulate360 https://articulate.com/360/trial?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=part-tict
After exploring the above presentation tools, the user friendly Padlet had been chosen twice by our group for our presentation. I am looking forward to using more…
Thanks facilitator A for guiding us through co-moderating Topic 2.
