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Find out more about MOOCs

23 Dec 2014

Submit an idea for a new Massive, Open, Online Course before 16 January 2015

MOOCs (Massive, Open, Online Courses) are an exciting new development in online education that allow higher education institutions to reach out to audiences that might not otherwise have access to their teaching material.

MOOCs are courses taught entirely online, and are freely available at no cost to anyone in the world with access to an internet connection. A typical MOOC lasts around six to eight weeks and is taught mostly through videos, supplemented by discussion forums, self-test quizzes and reading or web research activities. Anyone who achieves a pass grade in the activities, and usually a final assignment, is awarded with a certificate of completion.

Earlier this year, the University entered the MOOC (Massive, Open, Online Course) marketplace with four courses launched on the Coursera platform and covering a range of subject areas:

  • Population Health
  • Physical Chemistry
  • Water Supply and Sanitation
  • Global Health and Humanitarianism

These courses proved to be extremely popular – attracting around 50,000 enrolments from which 31,000 people actively participated and around 3,000 achieved a certificate. This was a truly international audience, with representatives from 184 countries taking part. The feedback on all of our courses was exteremly positive – with 94% of participants rating our MOOCs as “Excellent” or “Good” in the post-course surveys. 

In 2015 we hope to build on this success and will be running all four of our successful MOOcs for a second time, as well as developing a new batch of courses. Some of these new MOOCs will focus on the University’s 'beacon' areas of particular strategic importance and will include Graphene and Energy. We are also aiming to commission more courses from interested groups in all disciplines, and there is currently a call for expressions of interest that will be open until Friday, 16 January 2015.

If anyone would like any further information or is interested in submitting an expression of interest for a new MOOC, please contact the University's MOOCs Project Manager, Dr Ian Hutt (ian.hutt@manchester.ac.uk)