Since it first appeared in China, the coronavirus has gradually forced 1.5 billion students to stay home, 91% of the world’s total according to UNESCO. Within three months, many education institutions from K-12 to university had to move from classrooms to virtual environments and methods and results have differed from case to case. Although video conferencing software platforms provide a temporary solution to the online transition that respect existing classroom programs, it has been widely recognized that emergency remote teaching and online learning are not the same. Teachers and learners alike need different skills and competences to successfully deal with the changing formats, activities, roles and interactions in the online environment. Using, or re-using, MOOCs offers an amazing opportunity to create structured online courses with a balance of quality asynchronous content and synchronous seminar and feedback time.

 

To support the IPSA community of professors and students as they marshal an almost real-time response to the call for online learning, we share some useful links to help to teach and learn through quality open educational resource. (e-learning on the IPSAPortal)

 

How to Teach Online

For those who would like to learn how to design their online course with OER, they can follow courses like Virtual Teacher Specialization University of California, Irvine; Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction to Student Assessment Commonwealth Education Trust; How To Teach Online: Providing Continuity for Students on FutureLearn; Designing with Open Educational Resources (OER) on edX, the Harvard and MIT platform; and these courses provided by the European Schoolnet Academy network, aimed at professional teacher training. For the more adventurous, it is also possible to exploit the potential of tools aimed at creating open textbooks, such as PressBook and The Open Faculty Patchbook.

 

How to Learn Online

To better understand the framework in which the MOOC movement, and some of the most influential methods for online learning, has been developed, one important tool is the course Connectivism and Learning, by Stephen Downes, the American pioneer of e-learning, who together with George Siemens started the MOOC phenomenon in 2008. To experience the challenges of learning online, there are courses like How to Learn Online by edX and Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowsky, the most followed MOOC in the field with more than 2 million enrollments.

 

MOOCs

More than 15,000 courses from 1,000 universities, with more than 110 million students on board at the beginning of 2020, are available on the major platforms. Several are useful for Political Science. The Coursera platform offers a range of relevant courses like Moral Foundations of Politics  from Yale, Understanding International Relations Theory from Russian National Research School of Economics, Chinese Politics (part 1 and part 2) from Hong Kong Business School, plus more courses on Globalisation, Economic growth and Stability. Coursera is also extending free certification in some of these courses until the end of May 2020. Futurelearn, the British platform, provides access to courses like Propaganda and Ideology in everyday life from the University of Nottingham and the British Library, Global Resource Politics from the Hanyang University, Religion and Conflict from the University of Groningen and Religion, Radicalization, Resilience from the European University Institute.