Oregon State Ecampus<\/a> helped make the MOOC a reality, lending its expertise in online learning to the course by providing multimedia and support services.<\/p>\nAlthough OSU\u2019s inaugural MOOC was conceived with Oregon educators in mind, it ultimately had an international reach. About one-third of the participants studied from outside of the United States, with students hailing from Brazil, Syria, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Romania among other nations.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though our course wasn\u2019t targeted toward teachers teaching English in another country, people outside the U.S. are hungry for opportunities and ideas, and they are interested in seeing how they can improve their students\u2019 language development,\u201d Thompson said.<\/p>\n
The opportunity to engage learners on a global scale is an endeavor Oregon State plans to explore further, according to university provost and executive vice president Sabah Randhawa.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is important to be open to new possibilities and to be flexible and adaptable to new learning paradigms, including the MOOC learning format,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For Thompson, teaching the massive course made her even more aware of the desire for information \u2013 and the leadership role Oregon State can play in delivering it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a student who emailed me saying, \u2018I\u2019m sorry, I haven\u2019t been able to complete my assignment \u2013 we haven\u2019t had electricity for the last three days,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cThink about the opportunities that person had in the past to engage with materials from excellent universities in the U.S. \u2013 they were probably very limited.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is this big group of participants from around the world, but we don\u2019t really know much about them, what they need or how what we\u2019re already doing can meet their needs,\u201d Thompson said. \u201cPotentially there might be other OSU offerings in the future that might be of interest to them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Free online course helps OSU connect with the world on a massive scale<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6390,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[215854,196231],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2015","category-subfeatures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6390"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"MOOC](\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/outreach\/files\/2015\/03\/mooc.jpg\")
<\/p>\n