The genesis of MOOCs began to take shape in the late 1990s, when MIT launched its OpenCourseWare project, through which many educational institutions made their content available to the general public via the Internet. Gradually, in the 2000s, driven by the Web 2.0 phenomenon, Open Social Learning began to gain strength as a response to the growing needs of users for lifelong learning. Needs that, in many cases, were not covered by official educational institutions.

The first MOOC "Connectivism and Conective Knowledge" was created in 2008 by professors George Siemens and Stephen Downes and had 2,300 enrolments. In 2011, Sebastian Trun of Stanford University created the Udacity platform and his first MOOC course, on artificial intelligence, had 160,000 enrolments. The year 2012 was named the "year of MOOCs" due to the dizzying growth of this type of training, which was joined by the world's most prestigious universities. From that year onwards, the main platforms that host MOOC courses began to operate: Coursera, EdX, Udemy, MiríadaX, etc.

MOOC courses have a series of peculiarities that distinguish them from a traditional e-learning course, which are the following:

In the case of the UDC, the MOOC courses were hosted on the platform MiríadaX until 2022.

Currently, the UDC has its own open training platform (https://udcaberta.udc.gal/) to host both Mooc courses and other training activities aimed at both the educational community of the UDC and the general public.

In turn, the videos are public on the UDC's youtube channel and the textual material is available in the institutional repository (RUC).

If you belong to the UDC university community, you do not need to create an account, click on the Access menu at the top right and log in directly with your UDC user and password using the button provided for this purpose.

If you do not belong to the UDC community, click on the Login menu at the top right and create an account. It's a quick and easy process and all you need is an email address.

Yes, you can do all the available courses completely free of charge and once you have completed the training, you can download a diploma of completion.

If you only need an official certificate with digital signature, you will have to request it through a form and you will have to pay fees or not depending on the profile you have:

• UDC students: free of charge
• Students from outside the UDC: 10€.
• Other staff of the UDC: 20€.
• Other people related to the UDC: 50€.

MOOC courses are mainly made up of audiovisual material. They are usually distributed in weekly modules, with several short videos for each module in which teachers present the contents of the subject to be covered. These videos can be complemented with multimedia materials such as texts, infographics, interactive images, etc.

It should be remembered that a MOOC course does not have personalised tutoring in the style of a traditional e-learning course, but rather content oriented towards self-training and social learning in a network. Even so, effective dynamisation makes MOOC courses considerably increase their completion rate. This implies that in no case should a single teacher be in charge of the design and implementation of a MOOC course, but that it should be a joint work of several people with the following roles:

• Teachers: in charge of the pedagogical design of the course, the development of the videos, additional material and assessment activities.
• Facilitators or dynamisers: they will be in charge of communication with the students while the course is being taught. Encouraging participation in forums, social networks or any other means of communication that motivates students to actively participate and successfully complete the course.

There are various types of MOOCs with different didactic models, the most prominent and frequent are:

Due to their massive nature, the evaluation of MOOC courses must be carried out in ways that facilitate student autonomy. For this reason, the most recommendable assessment tools would be:

• Self-assessment test
• Peer assessment tasks (P2P), where the learners themselves assess each other.

In any case, UDCAberta is based on Moodle, which facilitates the use of many different tools for student assessment.

They do not have any. They are completely virtual and asynchronous, which means that you can do them at your own pace and at the time you have available.

Both. You can find:

• courses that are open to enrolment throughout the academic year. These are courses that are not tutored by teachers, they are self-taught.
• courses that have a specific start and end date (usually lasting 3 or 4 weeks) and have a teaching team behind them to dynamise and tutor the course.

In the description of each course, when you click on it, you can see the type of course it is and the start and end dates, if any.

Yes, undergraduate students can recognise the training taken at UDCAberta. One credit will be recognised for every 20 hours of training in these courses, up to a maximum of 3 credits per academic year.

All the related information can be consulted in the Resolution on the recognition of credits for activities published on 04/05/23, as well as in the associated regulations.

Yes, they are cumulative. In other words, to get 1 credit you need to do several courses until you reach 20 hours of training (e.g. 2 courses of 10 hours).

Once you have completed and passed the training. You must request an official certificate that certifies that you have passed the course. You can request it HERE.

Then, you must submit the certificate or certificates (in the case of not reaching 20 hours with a single course) to the administration of the centre where you are studying and apply for credit recognition there.

The syllabus is included in the Learning Guide, available once you have registered on the UDCAberta platform. When accessing Module 0, at the bottom of the module you can download the "Learning Guide" in .pdf format.

The UDC, through the Vice-rectorate for Internationalisation and Degrees, periodically publishes a call for MOOC courses to which teaching staff can submit their projects.

It is advisable for lecturers to ensure the originality and innovative nature of their proposal by searching MOOC search engines such as ClassCentral or Mooc.es.

Given the open nature of MOOCs, all MOOC materials must be licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

Each teaching team is free to choose the type of licence under which their content will be published.

It is the responsibility of the teaching teams to ensure the legal use of third-party materials by citing sources correctly and obtaining the necessary permissions for their publication.

For more information on this aspect, it is necessary to read the different calls for MOOC courses published.

It depends, some courses are remunerated and others are not, so the best thing to do is to look for this information in the corresponding call.

In addition, the UDC will recognise the work of the teaching team through certification for educational innovation in MOOC courses issued by the Vice-Rector's Office for Internationalisation and Qualifications.

Yes, the e-Learning Unit offers advice on the design of MOOC courses that are developed within the framework of research projects even though they have not been submitted to any official call for proposals. The difference is that the courses are recorded by the research project. Everything else (advice, uploading the videos to YouTube, registering the course in UDCAberta, etc.) is handled by the e-learning unit.

In terms of income and certification, these courses have the same rights as those approved in an official call. All the info here