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– The response has been amazing and we have participants from all over the world, north and south, says Anne Moen. Moen is one of the main contributors behind the MOOC in close collaboration with Jeanette H. Magnus and Øystein Røynesdal from Institute of Health and Society, and LINK.
The MOOC targets postgraduate students who wish to apply for a Ph.D. in Norway or internationally. It is funded by EXCEL SMART – an academic mobility program working to enhance the quality of higher education in Ethiopia.
Free and widely accessible
– The MOOC is widely accessible and a free digital learning resource with a global target audience. The MOOC is availbale through the platform FutureLearn, as a method to enhance the quality of higher education globally. The program lasts four weeks. The lectures in the MOOC present generic elements of the Ph.D. proposal, such as developing research questions, doing literature reviews, designing your study, project organization and more, explains Moen.
Important factors for the MOOC have been for the participants to be able complete the programme from home, to give the participants more time to complete, and that the program function well in areas with low bandwidth.
The content of the MOOC stems from courses run by the University of Oslo at Jimma University and Saint Paul’s Millennium Medical College in Ethiopia, through both EXCEL SMART (financed by DIKU’s NORPART programme) and SACCADE (financed by NORADs NORHED programme).