This chapter presents the M100S project, a math MOOC platform from the e-learning unit of the Polytechnic of Porto (P.PORTO). Reference is made to all motivational, structural, and fundamental steps of this process of creation and development, from its origin to the present day, and a brief analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of these recent educational resources. The general structure adopted for these mathematics MOOCs is presented, with all its features, and the difficulties inherent to the development of these courses from scratch are analyzed, both regarding the technological and financial support available as well as the human resources enrolled. Finally, several internal practices and applications made by means of the most varied open resources, specifically developed for these MOOCs and other existing ones from the MatActiva project, in Portuguese, both in a b-learning perspective and in the development of flipped teaching strategies, are mentioned.
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Given the context in which this chapter is, it would not be sensible to overstate the bibliographical and even historical review. Thus, a brief historical contextualization is carried out, followed by the global and general contextualization of the project.
In September of 2008, George Siemens (Athabasca University), Stephen Downes (National Research Council) and Dave Cormier (University of Prince Edward Island) created an open course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, also known as CCK08 (Cano, E. V., Meneses, E. L., & Sánchez-Serrano, J. L. S., 2013). This seems to be the first course to incorporate open learning with distributed content, making it the first true MOOC. From this point to current times much has been written about MOOCs (a quick search at b-on, for example, gives almost 16 000 results). Still growing and, somehow, operating “in the shadow”, MOOC seem to be carrying out an “open moving wave” in education. 2012 is often mentioned as ‘the MOOC year’ (Pappano, 2012), but the “distance learning/teaching” paradigm goes far beyond decades. With all the new technological advances of the actual “digital era”, HEI must be committed to raise the online access, in an opened or internal basis, to all kind of course resources like lecture notes, assessment materials, lecture recordings, among others, trying to take advantage of all the pedagogical/scientific potential these technological developments have to offer, maximizing their scope, while minimizing eventual, and common, geographical restrictions. Not wanting to go into excessive details one should not, at the same time, fail to mention much of what has been written for and against such open courses, at least in a summarized way (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
MOOC Pros and Cons: Resume