University of Tartu open access courses attract participants from over 70 countries

Ever since the University of Tartu started offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in 2014, Estonian higher education has reached learners in more than 70 countries worldwide.

The MOOC “Estimation of Measurement Uncertainty in Chemical Analysis” that started last week has 450 participants from 70 countries, the most exotic of which might be Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Jordan, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The course, led by Professor of Chemistry Ivo Leito, is in English and takes place for the second time. When it ran for the first time in 2014, it draw 270 participants from 40 countries.

“As in 2014, the majority of current participants are from analytical laboratories, once again demonstrating the continuing need for training in measurement uncertainty estimation in analytical chemistry,” Leito said.

The university’s most popular and first Estonia-language MOOC “About Programming” started on Monday. The leader of course, lecturer of the Institute of Computer Science Eno Tõnisson, said that as many as 650 people registered for the MOOC “About Programming” in only a couple of days. He added that although in the world popular MOOCs are available to thousands of learners at the same time, they decided to limit the number of participants in order to be able to offer them more personal support. Those who failed to register in time, will get another chance to enroll in the course in October.

Another recently finished MOOC – “Energy Policies in Europe” – had more than 150 participants.

The MOOCs are free and open for everyone. Participants will be supervised and graded and can receive a certificate after successful completion of the course.

The University of Tartu was the first in Estonia that started offering free online courses.

11 Mar 2015