The UPF amongst the European universities with a highest production of MOOC
The UPF amongst the European universities with a highest production of MOOC
On 10-11th October, the CLIK attended the FutureLearn Partners Forum in London, an event aimed at helping international universities define their strategy in digital education and promoting learning through MOOC, massive online open courses.
Over two days FutureLearn, UK's number 1 online course platform in Europe, offered extensive training in marketing, public relations, communication and the use of their own platform and summarized the keys to the success of digital education. The symposium hosted more than 100 British, European, American and Australian universities, all of them with several courses on FutureLearn. During the presentations, it became clear that medium-sized universities such as UPF often have a specialized team for MOOC and count with an average of 10 to 15 published MOOC. To date, UPF offers 20 MOOCs, thus raising the average.
"The success of online education lies in combining good content, dynamic facilitators and a user-friendly interface," said Nigel Smith, head of content at FutureLearn. Currently, the digital platform hosts more than 100 courses (8 of which from UPF) and has over 6,816,666 registered users.
"Universities need to work out a good marketing strategy and think carefully about the communication channels where they want to promote their MOOCs," explained Matt Walton, FutureLearn CPO. Indeed, it is a matter of engaging the teachers who have developed the MOOC so that they recommend their contents. This can be achieved through a good communication campaign that includes press reviews, advertisements ant the generation of "social noise" by discipline-related influencers.
"The use of social networks is key when it comes to promoting online courses," advised the MOOC production team at the University of Exeter (England). "In the case of our most successful MOOC, Who made my clothes?, Instagram was crucial to catch the attention of the younger audience."
Very different institutions such as Monash University, the Girls' Day School Trust, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the Health Education England Association, the British Parliament or the University of Bath also exchanged experiences with the success of their educational online programs.
Currently, the UPF has more than 200,000 users. Online courses are hosted on various platforms (FutureLearn, Coursera, MiriadaX, and P2P and Kadenze) and are offered in the three languages of the university.