Learning nuclear chemistry and radiochemistry through a massive open online course

A MOOC on Nuclear and RadioChemistry (NRC) has been developed within the EU-H2020 MEET-CINCH project, in order to attract more students towards the discipline and increase people awareness. The course is divided into five “weeks” highlighting the importance of radiochemistry and nuclear chemistry for environment, health, industry, nuclear energy and society. Each week consists of different modules covering all possible applications of NRC within the week topic. The module follows a pedagogical framework designed ad hoc, that gradually introduces the topic to students, giving them different examples and applications to understand the theoretical concepts and to acquire a technical terminology. Feedback obtained by the pilot edition showed very good results: despite the short duration of the course, 25% of the 203 users successfully completed the course achieving the Certificate of Accomplishment. The answers collected in the inital survey and the final customer satisfaction questionnaire showed that users belonged to the selected target group and greatly appreciated the presence of practical examples and the different lesson formats adopted. The MOOC objective of attracting new students towards NRC appears to be on a good track, however this can only be confirmed by monitoring the next MOOC editions.