They say that every cloud has a silver lining. COVID-19 outbreak is a cloud which has brought about many challenges, to say the least. But not without a silver lining at that. In the educational field, this lining took a shape of a giant leap in the development and application of distance learning technologies.
At UdSU we have long been talking about the modern-day’s necessity to enter the mainstream of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) developers. Such courses offer multiple benefits to both the educational institutions and users: on one hand, it is a great potential for marketing university’s brand and educational services, promoting research, and attracting highly motivated applicants. Users, in their turn, get access to on-demand knowledge and skillsets flexibly scheduled and delivered (and at no expense in many cases).
Since the beginning of 2021 two MOOCs by UdSU scholars have been launched on the national Stepik platform: the first one called “Pedagogical software. Development of LMS Moodle course” was created by the Candidate of Psychology Tatiana Naumova. It was designed to help university lecturers, secondary and vocational school teachers learn about building elements and resources for LMS Moodle course.
The second course is student-oriented and develops their ICT skills such as traditional and alternative ways to present data, e.g. slide shows, mind maps, screencasts. Doing this course can teach students how to most effectively and creatively use modern digital technologies for study and everyday life. The author of the course is the Candidate of History Nataliia Khlebnikova and a team of 5 UdSU students.
These two MOOCs are surely a good kick-off and we hope that more such courses from UdSU scholars will be arriving soon.
