Mid-year is traditionally a time for attending research and professional development conferences and workshops but travel restrictions have meant that many of those events have either gone online or have been postponed. For those whose conferences have been postponed, there are some useful (and free) opportunities for professional learning and teaching development – and at this time of year, you won’t have to look far.
Early in 2020, Coursera launched their Campus Response Initiative, giving partner universities like Macquarie free access to the Coursera catalogue. From now until the end of July, MQ staff and students have free access to enrol in most of the 3800-plus online courses available via the Coursera Response Program. Any courses started by 31 July can be completed until the program ends on 30 September. Coursera courses have been developed by world-leading universities, leading scholars and industry professionals, and cover a broad range of topics, including social sciences, humanities, healthcare, data science, business, technology and computer science. Here at Teche, interested as we are in teaching and professional learning development, there’s a number of relevant courses that start in early July – see below – so there’s still time to enrol and make the most of this limited-time offer.
Teaching development courses now open through Coursera
International offerings:
The Commonwealth Education Trust is offering The Foundations of Teaching for Learning program (specialisation) “for anyone who is teaching, or who would like to teach, in any subject and any context – be it at school, at home or in the workplace”.
The University of California, Irvine has a Virtual Teacher specialisation (5 courses) aimed at providing “best practices for online instruction, student engagement and virtual community building; effective uses of asynchronous and synchronous technologies, social media and other emerging technologies; and data analysis techniques and student performance measurements to individualize instruction in an online or blended environment.” Individual courses in the specialisation include:
- Foundations of Virtual Instruction
- Emerging Trends and Technologies in the Virtual K-12 Classroom
- Advanced Instructional Strategies in the Virtual Classroom
- Performance Assessment in the Virtual Classroom
- Virtual Teacher final project
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is offering Multimodal Literacies: Communication and Learning in the Era of Digital Media and Literacy Teaching and Learning: Aims, Approaches and Pedagogies
The University of Houston is offering a course titled Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Digital Storytelling.
At least one member of the Teche team is enrolled in the University of London’s Get Interactive: Practical teaching with technology course.
The University of London and University College London is asking (and answering) the question What future for education?
From Australian universities:
A very pertinent course for these times Learn to teach online (offered by UNSW)
Members of the Teche team and their colleagues recommend Cultural Competence – Aboriginal Sydney offered by the University of Sydney
And of course, the excel-lent (sorry) Excel Skills for Business Specialisation offered by Macquarie University.
How to access Coursera courses
All Macquarie staff and students currently have free access to all Macquarie- created courses (excluding Big History) on Coursera via Coursera for Macquarie, including those courses offered in the Global MBA.
All Macquarie staff and students have free access to most of the Coursera catalogue via the Coursera Response initiative with free enrolment until 31 July after which, they have time to finish by end of September. Those who are new to Coursera will need to create an account with their Macquarie email address. Users with an existing Coursera account will need to link their Macquarie email to their Coursera account to take up this offer. Further details here.
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