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I’m working on a couple of MOOCs in health sciences. To get my bearings on this new subject area and find out what other MOOCs in the discipline are teaching, I’ve been looking at the content for a handful of healthcare MOOCs. I’ll probably audit the courses rather than working through all of the assessments and discussions, but this should help with the brainstorming process on our own project, in terms of the types of content that work well.

If you’re working on an open education project in health science, you might find them helpful, too. Here’s what I’ve found, so far:

Practical Improvement Science in Health Care: A Roadmap for Getting Results

Platform: EdX

Institution: Harvard

Duration: 6 weeks, 2-4 hours per week

Pacing: Synchronous

Enrollment: 10k+

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

 

Medicine and the Arts: Humanising Healthcare

Platform: FutureLearn

Institution: University of Cape Town

Duration: 6 weeks, 3 hours per week

Pacing: Synchronous

Enrollment: Unknown

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

Improving the Health of Women, Children and Adolescents: From Evidence to Action

Platform: FutureLearn

Institution: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Duration: 6 weeks, 4 hours per week

Pacing: Synchronous

Enrollment: Unknown

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

 

The Many Faces of Dementia

Platform: FutureLearn

Institution: University College London

Duration: 4 weeks, 2 hours per week

Pacing: Synchronous

Enrollment:

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

The Impact of Nursing

Platform: FutureLearn

Institution: University of Liverpool

Duration: 4 weeks, 3 hours per week

Pacing: Synchronous

Enrollment: Unknown

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

 

eHealth

Platform: EdX

Institution: Karolinska Institutet

Duration: 6 weeks, 5-6 hours per week

Pacing: Self-paced

Enrollment: Unknown

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

 

Global Health and Humanitarianism

Platform: Coursera

Institution: University of Manchester

Duration: 6 weeks, 1-3 hours per week

Pacing: Self-Paced

Enrollment: Unknown

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

 

Take the Lead on Healthcare Quality Improvement

Platform: Coursera

Institution: Case Western Reserve University

Duration: 5 weeks, 5-7 hours per week

Pacing: Self-Paced

Enrollment: Unknown

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

 

Fixing Healthcare Delivery

Platform: Coursera

Institution: University of Florida

Duration: 9 weeks

Pacing: Self-Paced

Enrollment: Unknown

What they’ve done well:

What could be improved:

 

General Observations

The FutureLearn platform is superior to the others, in terms of the design and user experience. Most of the other platforms are fairly outdated and clunky, design-wise. I do wonder if it may be a little restrictive, from a course producer’s perspective, though. I like that it has a discussion attached to every learning step, as these seem to get used fairly frequently and serve to create a community of learners. Their existence will make more work for the course lead who has to monitor them all.

On EdX, I like that the videos have transcripts that run alongside them. The current voiceover text is highlighted, so it’s easy to keep your place. The more high-achieving students will skim through the transcript rather than watching the video anyway, so this helps to save them time. It also appeals to the students who prefer to hear information, and those who prefer to read it.

Overall, I’ve found these MOOCs disappointing in that they nearly all rely heavily on video and text. There are limited opportunities for active learning. I haven’t seen much in the way of interactivity or graphic explainers throughout the MOOCs, which is a real shame. The health science material would lend itself to highly engaging data visualisations and graphics, so there’s a big missed opportunity here. The web is an interactive medium, and this offers many opportunities for activity and personalisation. But in almost all cases, the MOOCs I’ve seen are highly reliant on the passive watching of video lecture.

It could be a symptom of the types of course I’m looking at, or simply the nature of academia itself, but there does seem to be a lack of diversity here. Too often, it’s a middle-aged white male in the talking head videos I’ve watched. I have other issues with talking head videos, but that’s another story! I do think there’s a responsibility here to make sure the faces of these MOOCs are representative of the global audience they are aimed at. I’d love to see more female course leads, a diversity of age range, and people of varied ethnicities.

Have I missed any health & social care MOOCs that you enjoyed? Are you developing one? Let me know on Twitter and I’ll update this list.