2015.1102
MOOCs at NTNU Onboard
MOOCs at NTNU (http://moocs.ntnu.edu.tw/) is now officially onboard! Starting from November 1st, classes like “Ten Western Classic”, “Solar Power and Life” “Promote Reading in High School and Library Management” will be available online, you can browse the web and enjoy learning just one click away at any time you wish.
MOOCS means Massive Open Online Courses. This kind of online teaching courses is very popular in the states. NTNU has been working on 12 MOOC courses since 2014, including “Art of Taiwan: Contemporary Taiwan Art” “Reading Study” and the site helps digitizing courses of Mandarin Teaching, Teacher Training and General knowledge. By far, the site has reached 35,459 visits and 43,669 visits for the courses. 2,016 people have enrolled in MOOCs at NTNU.
Associate Professor Yeh Meng Wan from the Department of Earth Sciences expressed his surprise that Overseas Chinese from Malaysia, America, and New Zealand also attend classes online. “I think that now I have students all over the world.” His course “From the Birth of Earth to its Evaluation” is widely welcomed online. He said “This is an online open course, everyone who is interested can enroll and learn, I think that’s one of the great things to be a teacher on MOOCs.”
From the MOOCs plan by the Ministry of Education, NTD 50 million budget are put on promoting online courses per year, so the courses are free of charge. Director of the Department of Information and Technology Education Li Tsai Yen stated that this is a learning program for every citizen, and he and his colleges are surprised that MOOCs became far more popular than expected.
There are 153 course on the Taiwan MOOC website, including fields like business management, English, film, and even quantum physics. The most enrolled course on MOOC this semester is Ocean Museum. After taking this course, you would have learned about 10 ocean museums around the world.
The Ministry of Education hopes that there will be some certificate for MOOC students. Director Li said that “It’s part of lifelong learning, we hope everyone can be responsible of the courses they take.” Associate Professor Yeh said that one of the student told him that he graduated 20 years ago and now he feels like a student again through courses of MOOC and Associate Professor Yeh is truly happy about it.