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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Distance learning - where students take courses (attend classes, get activities and other sort of
learning materials) while being physically separated from their instructors, for larger part of the course
duration - is far from being a “new event”. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this has been
done through Radio, Mail and TV, taking advantage of the full educational potential that these media
resources had to offer at the time. However, in recent times we have, at our complete disposal, the
“magic wonder” of communication and globalization - the Internet. Taking advantage of a whole new
set of educational opportunities, with a more or less unselfish “look” to economic interests, focusing its
concern on a larger and collective “welfare”, contributing to the development of a more “equitable”
world, with regard to educational opportunities, the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were
born and have become an important feature of the higher education in recent years. Many people
have been talking about MOOCs as a potential educational revolution, which has arrived from North
America, still growing and spreading, referring to its benefits and/or disadvantages.
The Polytechnic Institute of Porto, also known as IPP, is a Higher Education Portuguese institution
providing undergraduate and graduate studies, which has a solid history of online education and
innovation through the use of technology, and it has been particularly interested and focused on
MOOC developments, based on an open educational policy in order to try to implement some
differentiated learning strategies to its actual students and as a way to attract future
ones. Therefore, in July 2014, IPP launched the first Math MOOC on its own platform. This paper
describes the requirements, the resulting design and implementation of a mathematics MOOC, which
was essentially addressed to three target populations: - pre-college students or individuals wishing to
update their Math skills or that need to prepare for the National Exam of Mathematics; - Higher
Education students who have not attended in High School, this subject, and who feel the need to
acquire basic knowledge about some of the topics covered; - High School Teachers who may use
these resources with their students allowing them to develop teaching methodologies like "Flipped
Classroom” (available at http://www.opened.ipp.pt/). The MOOC was developed in
partnership with several professors from several schools from IPP, gathering different
math competences and backgrounds to create and put to work different activities such video lectures
and quizzes. We will also try to briefly discuss the advertising strategy being developed
to promote this MOOC, since it is not offered through a main MOOC portal, such as Coursera or
Udacity.
Description
Keywords
Innovation MOOCs Mathematics Online learning Technology in teaching and learning