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Open MOOCs Offered Through the OECx Partnership Expand

Hokkaido University, Tufts University, and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), are currently running open MOOCs this month on the edX platform through the OECx partnership program.   OEC entered into a partnership with edX last April to allow its member institutions to re-use existing open courseware to develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).   The re-use of these high quality open educational resources presents new opportunities for collaboration, scaling educational access, and cost effective curriculum development.

This year, 8 Open MOOCs are available through OECx ranging from topics of energy usage, biology of water and health, introduction to business, teacher education in India, introduction to helicopters, corporate social responsibility, and the effects of radiation.  There are three currently running courses listed below although all courses remain open for viewing and accessing materials after they have completed.

Effects of Radiation is a four-week long course that deals with a variety of topics related to radiation and radioactivity. Eight instructors from different departments collaboratively teach this course, and learners will explore basics of radiation and radioactivity, radiation measurement, effects of radiation on a human body, and the use of radiation in our environment with comprehensive examples. The course materials, which are offered as OER, are developed based on another OER originally used in Japan, which are shared among several national universities in Hokkaido. Registration remains open: https://www.edx.org/course/effects-radiation-introduction-radiation-oecx-radio101x

The Biology of Water and Health from Tuft’s University uses a unique interdisciplinary approach to give the general public, as well as health professionals in a variety of fields, a provocative introduction to the public health and human engineering components involved in the provision of safe water and sanitation. It provides an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the place of water in health policy and engineering by helping participants give informed voice to the ways in which water is involved in social interactions, belief systems, and the economics of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Part II of this award winning course will be offered in September on the edX platform. Registration remains open: https://www.edx.org/course/biology-water-health-part-1-oecx-ph241x-0/

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) offered in Spanish from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid addresses the need for corporations to transform themselves during this time of profound economic, social, and politic change associated with deterioration of the environment and how digital technologies can be enablers of this change. Students in this course will be introduced to CSR and corporate governance including the influence of digital technologies and information systems, as well as the need to establish a framework of corporate governance to help organizations remain viable. We’ll discuss how to implement it, losses to organizations for poor performance, and how to monitor the process through audits of the strategy. Finally a case of study of corporate governance models at universities utilizing CSR will help learners see a real-world application. Registration remains open at  https://www.edx.org/course/responsabilidad-social-corporativa-y-su-oecx-b1156-x/

Other OEC institutions that have run Open MOOCs through OECx this year include National Chiao Tung University, Anne Arundel Community College, and the TESS-India project at Open University, United Kingdom.