A SUCCESSFUL EXPERIENCE OF A MOOC IN PORT WATERS’ QUALITY MANAGEMENT
Current challenges in aquatic science literacy requires the implementation of innovative tools (e.g. Massive Online Open Courses, MOOC) to enable dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge to a diverse public.
The new European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the development of the Open Educational Resources (OER) is a unique opportunity to adapt and optimize the transference to society of the knowledge and advances of the Academic World.
Building up on this, the OCWs (Open Course Ware) have arrived, making educational contents — mainly written material — available to the general public in a full, free, and reusable manner. However, the MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) are the ones bringing audiovisual contents and the possibility of doing evaluation tests and accredit what has been learned, which truly represents an academic revolution. The University of Cantabria (UC) has been adapting itself to these new ways of teaching, through the development of very active policies on OCW and MOOC creation. Moreover, the UC has been backing the idea for these courses to be OER, that is to say, for them to be on the public domain or with an open license. This institutional project has involved many departments and professors, with very satisfying results.
An open, massive and free training, launched through the Miriada X platform (https://www.miriadax. net), provided the opportunity to the Environmental Hydraulics Institute of the University of Cantabria (IHCantabria) for transferring the Spanish technical guidelines for ports water quality management (ROM 5.1) to a great number of people, without being subject to location, education, profession or financial circumstances. More than 4000 students (in 4 editions), from different countries, have enrolled the course structured in 6 weekly modules, with a total duration of 36 hours.
The course provides a dynamic learning, through chiefly audiovisual materials, a vast documentary collection and combines multiple-choice tests and peer-to-peer evaluation as compulsory activities.
Collaborative tools -forum, wiki, q&a- are encouraged to use through voluntary activities (photography contest, brainstorming legislation, etc.). Eight times higher than other MOOCs at University of Cantabria, the students have requested the certification of course completion, being useful for their skillset and professional training. This MOOC has also improved the networking on the topic (twitter, linkedin, etc.) and provided a great opportunity for divulgation of other research activities carried out by the R&D Groups at IHCantabria.
It is evident that education models and knowledge transferring are changing became very diverse: flipped classroom, learning skills, cooperative learning, gamification, use of social networks, use of open educational resources, etc. In particular, the development of open educational resources has been a revolution, as it has allowed make available to the general public a vast amount of high quality educational materials. These materials are reused and making better by their use under the licenses that permit and encourage to reuse it. They are therefore a key element in the transfer of knowledge from the university to society by providing knowledge through a massive but tutorized education. However, to ensure the success of MOOCs it is necessary to offer authentic OER (Open Education Resources) materials being truly open, and not only free and accessible, but also reusable.
The course ROM 5.1 Port waters’ quality of the Miriada X platform is a good example of a postgraduate training in a MOOC format which has a good reception in the public.
