Retos en los Recursos Educativos Abiertos: desarrollo del MOOC TOX-OER (Challenges in Open Educational Resources: the case of TOX-OER MOOC) - Editorial Amarante

Open educational resources (OER) have as their objective the integration of digital tools into learning by developing scientific and educational materials freely available on the net. At the same time, they are a good model of cooperative implication and participation between professionals from different academic areas and geographical locations. In this context, a massive open online course (MOOC) about Toxicology has been developed. It is called TOX-OER (“Learning Toxicology through Open Educational Resources”), and it is implemented under the Erasmus+ Program. This project, led by the University of Salamanca, has been developed by a consortium among professionals from very different fields (experts in Toxicology, Chemistry, ICT, Pedagogy, etc.) from 7 countries, including the Universities of Salamanca (Spain), Porto (Portugal), Bologna (Italy), Charles (Czech Republic), Applied Sciences of the Southeast of Finland (Finland), Transylvania Brasov (Romania), and a Research Institute (Space Research and Technology Institute, Bulgaria). The MOOC platform consists on 7 different modules that include 22 topics with specific toxicological content. According to the philosophy of these “open, massive and free” resources, the material is available in English and in the native languages of the 7 partners, in order to reach out to the maximum number of people. The goal of this book is to share the experience of the development of this project through a technical, educational and personal perspective that can be used as a guide for others in this same path. The book has been divided into several chapters. After the introduction, it provides a general overview of Toxicology as an emerging science, and it lays the foundations for the need to promote its knowledge in online learning. It explains the teaching basis of this type of courses, the concept of OERs, the use of Creative Commons licenses and the basic requirements for the construction of a MOOC. The next chapter, “The TOX-OER MOOC” approaches the specific contents of TOX-OER. It explains the construction of the teaching architecture of the course and the work process that led to the definition of scripts in the first place, followed by the production of OERs. The chapter “Moodle as a MOOC platform” explains the reasons why Moodle was the chosen platform for this project. It describes in detail the basic properties of Moodle in order to guide potential users. The section “TOX-OER content development” is a basic guide of the available tools for content development, and of the variety of resources and activities that can be implemented in the teaching script. Visualization in a MOOC is another challenge undertaken by this project. Therefore, thanks to the experience it provided, this book offers some guidelines for anyone who wishes to develop materials with these characteristics, from the simple concept of video edition to the use of the YouTube channel. Once that the platform had been built, the teaching mechanisms had to be designed (“Teaching using a MOOC”). This chapter provides reflections about the shifts in educational paradigms that involve using different tools, learning how to control them and giving free rein to creativity. The topics of the recognition of learning and the state of the art are presented in the chapter “Learning Recognition”. It describes several strategies that were implemented to recognize the learning acquired through a MOOC. Finally, the book lays down the basics for the quality control of a MOOC (“Quality control in a MOOC”).