Massive Online Open Courses for Continuous Career Development in Health Professionals

Introduction

When talking about MOOC's, we delve into the subject of innovation, experimentation and new emerging models in education. By its acronym in English it refers to Courses: which have learning objectives that in turn provide materials and evaluation tools, Massive: they were thought, designed and implemented for a large number of participants, Online: they can be distributed over the internet and Open: they may have no entry requirements and they could be free, so they offer the ideal format for formal and informal learning with all the changes the 21st century has brought (Ballesteros, et. al., 2019).

However, the term was born in 2008 in Canada: when George Siemens and Stephen Downes offered the course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge at the University of Manitoba, where 2,300 people enrolled. Later, in 2011, a course was organized at Stanford University by Sebastian Thrun, professor at said university, and Peter Norvig, Google's research director, called Introduction to Artificial Intelligence: reporting an attendance of 160,000 people, however the word MOOC was coined by Professor Cornier.

The precursor of MOOC's can be found in 2001, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) provided free access to its official course materials: 1,900 courses between undergraduate and graduate degrees. Secondly, the Open Social Learning movement arises, related to informal education; it intends to discover a series of practices facilitated by a set of tools and conditions, associated with a new way of understanding the teaching-learning processes.

For a course to be considered a MOOC, it must have the following distinctive characteristics:

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  It is an educational resource that is similar to a class in the classroom.

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  Has a start and end date.

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  Contains an evaluation.

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  It's online.

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  Is free.

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  It is open through the web, and has no admission criteria.

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  Allows large-scale interactive participation of hundreds of students.

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  Focuses its attention on collaborative nature.

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  The teacher is placed in the background as a secondary role because it is considered autonomous learning, that is, participants don't need to have support from a teacher or online tutor on the other side of the connection.

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  It's of a non-formal nature.

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  Promotes a complementary acquisition to the study grade of the participants.

Taking into consideration the above, it's an emerging techno-pedagogical educational model of learning where the interaction between materials, ideas and people are intertwined in a communitarian way that's centered on the students, who are directly and absolutely responsible for their own learning, as they break the traditional idea of teaching, since logically what a MOOC promotes is not face-to-face or in person teaching, neither is it what we usually understand by distance learning, but rather it's online teaching that constitutes a useful tool for complementary training of participants. It is massive because it's a training proposal addressed to thousands of participants simultaneously and open because it's free to access, with no requirements, only motivation to learn (Fernández, et. al., 2018).

Due to these characteristics, several MOOC management platforms have emerged worldwide. Some examples of platforms are Coursera, Udacity, EdX, MiriadaX, among others, who offer an infinite number of courses related to different areas of knowledge. Similarly, various Higher Education institutions have proposed their own courses, which take advantage of the modular and decentralized design, based on specific needs, and at the same time dynamic and adaptable (Orozco, et. al., 2020).