KI launches Sweden’s first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
Karolinska Institutet’s online courses will be available for everybody on the shared platform edX.org which is a non-profit platform that was founded by the two leading universities Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The massive open online courses are not part of Karolinska Institutet’s regular education programs which means that the participants will not receive any credit points for completing the courses; they have however the possibility to receive a edX-certificate that can be linked directly to their LinkedIn profiles.
Since the massive open online courses are for free and there are no entry requirements, they are accessible for thousands of people around the globe who want to increase their knowledge in various fields.
Available courses
The first two open online courses will start on 9 September: Explore Statistic with R and Behavioral Medicine: A Key to Better Health. Signing up for these courses is still possible on the edx.org website.
Explore Statistic with R will allow the participants to learn statistics in a practical, experimental way, through statistical programming with R, using examples from the health sciences. The course is held by Andreas Montelius, researcher and teacher at Karolinska Institutet.
Behavioral Medicine: A Key to Better Health focuses on how to change everyday behaviours for healthier lives using basic behavioural medicine concepts. The lecturer for this course will be Dr Anne H Berman, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at Karolinska Institutet.
Later this year, two more courses will be held: An Introduction to Global Health with Asli Kulane, Associate Professor in International Health and Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trials in Health Care with Merrick Zwarenstein, Professor and the Director of the Centre for Studies in Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario and holder of an honorary Professorship at Karolinska Institutet.
Opportunities for Karolinska Institutet
The massive open online courses are a great opportunity for Karolinska Institutet to develop both pedagogical and technical competences in order to design courses that allow several thousand people to participate. In a long term these competences can be used even for other on campus activities and therefore they can contribute to Karolinska Institutet’s position as one of Sweden’s leading universities, both in research and education but also in future developments such as digitalization.
For Karolinska Institutet, offering massive open online courses through the edX platform means joining some of the world’s leading universities in sharing their knowledge with the general public. Thereby the open online courses contribute to Karolinska Institutet’s mission: to contribute to the improvement of human health through research and education.