Traditionally, MOOC stands for ‘Massive open online course’. Typically, a course can be defined as something like ‘a series of lectures or lessons in a particular subject, typically leading to a qualification’, and implies a fairly unidirectional manner of learning.
However, this doesn’t seem to resonate with what we are trying to achieve. We value learning as a peer-to-peer community-based process, where learning is reciprocated through individuals who are at the same time learners and teachers. This form of collaborative learning can be more powerful for both the process itself, and empowering individuals to grow as part of a well-connected and engaged community. And Open Science seems to be a great thing to base this on!
To test this, we put out a little poll on Twitter:
For our specific use case, do you think the C in MOOC is best defined as a Course or Community?
— Open Science MOOC (@OpenScienceMOOC) September 9, 2018</blockquote>
So, what do you think? Let us know on social media, or by email.
Other news
Task 3 of the Open Source and Open Research Software module has been drafted! This is a cool task that puts some of the peer-to-peer learning aspects we mentioned above into action, and is all about integrating Git and RStudio for research workflows.
We finally launched a Facebook page and gained more than 200 likes in a week!
We also created this cool presentation below that describes the purpose of the MOOC. This can be re-used and presented by anyone who wishes! Let us know if you feel it can be improved in any way too.
<footer>Available in: PDF or .odp or .pptx formats </footer>
We also set up a neat little app that allows anyone to automatically join the GitHub team for the MOOC development.
Our website domain was updated to opensciencemooc.eu.
We were mentioned in this EuroScientist piece, Accelerate Open Science Training for Researchers.
We became strategic partners with the Joint Roadmap on Open Science Tools and AfricArxiv.
What can you do to help out?
As always, make sure to join our open Slack channel and join in the discussions there, as well as introducing yourself. We now have more than 230 users here, which is incredible!
The next module to develop will be the first on Open Principles, and we are all cracking on already with content development here. If you are interested in helping out with this and joining our amazing Production Team, please let us know! While this is open to everyone, we especially welcome people from typically under-represented groups as part of this.
Share information about the MOOC with your friends and colleagues, including asking them to sign up to our mailing list! We are on Twitter too for those of you who use it.
In the future, we want to create an introductory video for the whole MOOC. If you would like to be part of this, simply send us a short video recording of yourself (and/or your colleagues) saying something like “Hi, my name is XXX, and I/we love Open Science!” This can be in whatever language or setting you want - the more the better!
We appreciate all of your ongoing support, and will continue with developing the content and putting it out there for use as soon as it is ready.
Cheers!
Jon and the Open Science MOOC team