Phl 1st massive open online course offered free

MANILA, Philippines - The first-ever massive online open course (MOOC) in the Philippines is now being offered by the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) in cooperation with wireless leader Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart).

Forming part of the UPOU-Smart partnership agreement signed in February this year, Introduction to Mobile Application Development using the Android Platform, is the first MOOC to be offered by UPOU through the Faculty of Information and Communication Studies (FICS).

The course is free of charge and interested parties can sign up at http://fics.upou.edu.ph/aral.

MOOC, a recent development in distance education, is a model for delivering learning content online on different topics aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web.  In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, reading and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students and professors.

With MOOCs, one can enroll for courses offered by leading global institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, Columbia University and MIT.  Recently, groups such as Coursera, Udadity and Khan Academy, which were formed out of collaborations among academics from top universities, offer MOOCs at no cost.

Unlike courses offered via the traditional distance education model, MOOCs are not tied to one university. Those taking up MOOCs are also not required to enroll in all courses that lead to a diploma or degree.

Anyone with Internet connectivity can sign up for these courses, which run from a month to 15 weeks. While enrollees do not earn college-level credit from most MOOC sites, some do offer credits and certificates for a fee.

With MOOC now available in the Philippines, anyone from anywhere in the country or elsewhere in the world can sign up for Android mobile apps development course, one of the pilot courses that will be offered by UPOU in partnership with Smart under this online platform.

The offering of the Android apps development course coincides with the launch of UPOU’s online platform for MOOCs, Aral.

“This is part of UPOU’s efforts to make quality education more accessible to the public beyond the four walls of the classroom,” said UPOU Chancellor Dr. Grace Javier-Alfonzo.

She added that opening up UPOU’s education resource and offering more courses that have strong potential demand from the marketplace helps bring about social transformation.