MOOCs for Teachers: eBooks, Digital Storytelling and EXPO2015

In school year 2013-14, HOC-LAB at Politecnico di Milano was one of the first Italian institutions to design and deploy MOOCs. Two MOOCs were offered, aimed at teachers: “eBooks and Digital Publishing” and “Digital Storytelling at School”. In both cases, efforts were spent to carefully design the educational experience, to provide learners with good quality content and to support them during the course; issues like professional video-editing, on the other hand, were purposely neglected: costs were thus kept low. The MOOCs gathered a remarkable number of participants (on the whole, almost 2,500) and gave vent to fairly positive results. In this paper, we present the design of the two MOOCs and the evaluation data. The main lesson learned is that a low-cost approach that puts the quality of the content and of the pedagogical implementation at centerstage can be very effective.