Three Lessons from a Europeana MOOC moderator

1. The Europeana in your classroom MOOC helps us make copyright issues clear to teachers.

2. The Europeana in your classroom MOOC helps teachers to be more confident in using digital culture for education.

3. The greatest obstacle for teachers accessing digital cultural heritage for education is language.

What is the most valuable aspect of the last edition of the Europeana in your classroom MOOC?

When comparing the results and impact of both Europeana MOOC editions, we can see that the last edition of the MOOC exceeded the already excellent results of the first edition. The course started in February 2019 and lasted for 6.5 weeks. The course had a huge number of registrants (3,011 people) from 55 countries and had an engagement rate of 56% (1,696 participants) and a completion rate of 37% (627 participants). The post-course survey results show that 98% rated the overall value of the course as ‘Good’ or ‘Very good’. 95% would recommend the course to a colleague or a friend and  93% agreed that they now know how copyright works and how to use digital cultural heritage.

The Facebook group of the course had more than 1,000 members who were very actively involved during the course and their messages showed a high level of satisfaction with the course. After the course ended, teachers sent me lots of messages and photos from their classrooms showing how they are implementing the learning scenarios created during the MOOC.

What are the challenges you have faced during the running of the course?

For many participants on this MOOC, it was their first ever MOOC. They had  practical questions and problems because they had never participated in such a course before and it was a bit challenging at times.

Many teachers said that before this MOOC they never thought about copyright issues at all and although everything was nicely explained they still wanted to use items from Europeana Collections that are not free to use. For a future edition, I would suggest a whole webinar dedicated to copyright issues to be included in the MOOC.

When the teachers started working on their learning scenarios, some maths teachers complained that they couldn’t find appropriate resources. After an open discussion, some other maths teachers offered great ideas and suggestions and helped their colleagues through the exchange of ideas and possibilities. In the end, we got some very interesting learning scenarios by maths teachers. It would be good to include these in future MOOCs  because it was obvious that maths teachers needed some incentive and more practical examples on how to use Europeana in their area.

What are the next steps for the MOOC and your involvement with the Europeana Education project?

While moderating this MOOC, I realised that the greatest obstacle for many teachers is language. There are so many great teachers with great ideas but it is hard for them to create a learning scenario in English. For instance, during my Europeana webinar for Croatian teachers, all they asked for was a MOOC in their mother tongue. So, it is clear that it would be great to have the MOOC translated in some other European languages as well, other than Spanish and Portuguese.

My involvement with the Europeana Education project has been a challenging and rewarding one and I hope it stays that way next year. I will continue my work with the Croatian user group as Europeana Teacher Ambassador for Croatia. I hope that my group stays as hard-working and creative as they have been this year and I look forward to new, innovative learning scenarios and implementation stories. Also, together with one of the MOOC participants, I will be presenting Europeana to Croatian teachers at a national conference (applying ICT in education) that will be held in November.