The University of Nottingham has been running NOOCs — Nottingham open online courses, the Nottingham-only version of MOOCs — for several years.
A professional services NOOC called ‘The Changing University: Inside Nottingham’ was run in Moodle in late 2014 and was received very favourably. I wrote about it here a while back and reported how, thanks to a great deal of work by many colleagues, this four week course had a great first run and over 400 members of staff signed up and participated.
I’m really pleased that a new professional services NOOC called ‘Competition and Collaboration: Working in the University of Today’ is to be run from this week, beginning 30 May, for four weeks. The NOOC will focus on universities — both Nottingham and universities more generally — in a world where they are expected to compete as well as collaborate.
We’re inviting all our UK, China and Malaysia professional services staff to attend, learn something new, do some research, offer their opinions and find out what their colleagues think. There is no commitment to completing the NOOC — users can just drop in and out as and when they have time available. It’s anticipated that a maximum of 2-3 hours will be needed per week to complete the course. The learning material is available via Moodle and links will point to web articles, videos, pictures and the occasional forum.
One of the really important aims of the previous course was to provide opportunities for participants to work with, learn from and collaborate with colleagues from across all of our campuses. There was certainly plenty of engagement from all parts of professional services and this was really one of the best things about the course for me – lots of staff talking about their experiences of working at the University and many expressing degrees of surprise about parts of the institution they were not aware existed.
Here’s hoping this new NOOC works just as well.
