Karolinska Institutet is now starting up the first MOOC in Sweden
Today, Sweden's medical university, Karolinska Institutet, becomes the first university in the country to offer MOOCs (massive open online courses). This means that the university will be enriched this autumn by more than 70,000 new course participants from all over the world who will benefit from the top expertise of its teaching staff on a daily basis.
Specifically, it is the collaboration with international education group edX that has paved the way for these MOOCs. EdX is a non-profit group that began as a collaboration between Harvard University and MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The idea is to use a common platform in order to offer free, high-quality education via the internet in the form of MOOCs. This collaboration has now expanded to involve 36 universities around the world and the edX platform has more than 900,000 registered users.
“I see a huge number of spinoff effects in MOOC. Karolinska Institutet gets global exposure and can attract good students in the international education arena. But these courses also create an important internal process for the development of new courses and programmes," says Dean of Higher Education Jan-Olov Höög.
KIx is the name of Karolinska Institutet's online portal, and today marks the start of two of this autumn's four courses, which together have more than 70,000 registered students from all over the world. Although the courses start today, they are still open for registration and all that is needed to participate is a computer and an internet connection. However, if you want to get a certificate at the end of the course, you must submit the work required for credits in all the course elements within the time allowed.