Coursera and edX offer some of the most polished and professional online courses, for free, and from many of the most reputable institutions on the planet. It’s well worth keeping your eye out for courses that catch your interest, but just in case you haven’t had a chance to peruse their latest offerings, here are five really exciting MOOCs for teachers looking to get techy.
Here is just a taste of what you could learn in the ‘Design and Development of Educational Technology‘ course from MIT.
1. Design and Development of Educational Technology
To be effective, educational technologies must be designed based on what we know about how people learn. Through interviews with multiple experts in the field, this course examines educational technologies, outlines the theories that influenced their development, and examines their use. The course leads up to a final project – a kickstarter style pitch for a new educational technology – which is worked on iteratively across the weeks.
School: MITx
Start: 8 Oct 2014  Length: 6 weeks  Effort: 4-6 hours/week
2. What future for education?
Everyone has experienced education as a learner: these experiences shape how we view and value education, and how we think it should develop in the future. In this course we critically examine a range of ideas around education: including learning, teaching and schooling. Our aim is to consider what our preferred future for education might look like.
School:Â University of London
Start: 29 Sep 2014  Length: 6 weeks  Effort: 6-8 hours/week
3. An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching
This course will provide graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) who are planning college and university faculty careers with an introduction to evidence-based teaching practices. Participants will learn about effective teaching strategies and the research that supports them, and they will apply what they learn to the design of lessons and assignments they can use in future teaching opportunities.
School:Â Vanderbilt University
Start: 6 Oct 2014  Length: 7 weeks  Effort: 8-10 hours/week
4. E-learning and Digital Cultures
This course will explore how digital cultures and learning cultures connect, and what this means for the ways in which we conduct education online. The course is not about how to ‘do’ e-learning; rather, it is an invitation to view online educational practices through a particular lens – that of popular and digital culture.
School: The University of Edinburgh
Start: Nov 2014  Length: 5 weeks  Effort: 5-7 hours/week
5. Programming for Everybody (Python)
This course is specifically designed to be a first programming course using the popular Python programming language. The pace of the course is designed to lead to mastery of each of the topics in the class. We will use simple data analysis as the programming exercises through the course. Understanding how to process data is valuable for everyone regardless of your career. This course might kindle an interest in more advanced programming courses or courses in web design and development or just provide skills when you are faced with a bunch of data that you need to analyze.
School: University of Michigan
Start: 6 Oct 2014  Length: 10 weeks  Effort: 2-4 hours/week
Feature image courtesy of Flickr, Unhindered by Talent.