Use of Coursera for Campus in the Erasmus MC minor Global Health
At the time of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, CLI supported various initiatives to make the sudden switch from on-campus to online education easier for lecturers and students. One of these initiatives was to become involved in Coursera’s Coursera for Campus initiative. This enabled lecturers to use Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to broaden their online education and enhance this with content developed for various universities across the world.
Goal
Jan Nouwen used two different existing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to design education online during the crisis within the EMC Global Health minor and Summer Course 1 of the Infection & Immunity research master. The MOOC Essentials of Global Health, developed by Yale University, was used for the minor. The MOOC from Rice University entitled Fundamentals of Immunology was used for the course of the Infection & Immunity master's degree.
Coursera for Campus offered the opportunity to combine academic knowledge from across the world and use this in our own Minor and Summer Course courses. This enabled students to study the MOOC content online and at their own tempo, which freed space for more in-depth discussions of content in lectures and discussions with students. Despite the fact that the education is fully online, the use of MOOCs and the subsequent activating online lectures resulted in a diverse and rich learning experience for students. Moreover, by using Coursera, the students were given the opportunity to review the lesson content, enabling them to stay in control of their own learning process.
Results
The learning data behind Coursera for Campus offers insight into how students used the MOOCs. Apparently almost all students completed the MOOC Essentials van Global Health from Yale University. Moreover, the students gave the MOOCs they followed at least 4 stars, with the majority giving the MOOC 5 stars.
As experiences with Coursera for Campus were so good, the MOOC Essentials of Global Health will also be used in the Minor Global Health programme in the coming academic year.
The MOOC Fundamentals of Immunology will be used as pre-course in the coming academic year prior to the start of the 1st Summer Course of the Research Master Infection & Immunity.