POSTECH News
POSTECH to Develop Open Online Courses Together With SNU, KAIST
South Korea’s top three universities have come together to develop the highest quality STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) courses one can find online.
President Doh-Yeon Kim of POSTECH, President Nak-in Sung of Seoul National University (SNU), and President Sung-Mo Kang of KAIST gathered on Wednesday, October 14, 2015 and signed an agreement outlining their joint efforts to develop MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) content for basic STEM subjects.
The agreement was born out of the three universities’ consensus that the traditional way of knowledge transfer is insufficient in elevating the quality of teaching and learning in the STEM fields. Faculty members of these universities will collaborate from the very initial stage of developing the curriculum and will produce contents for the online courses by summer 2016, which will be openly available to the public. They also plan to create an education model that utilizes the online contents and share with any higher education institution wishing to participate.
For a start, online courses will cover the rudimentary knowledge of physics, chemistry, life sciences, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and materials engineering. The courses will be designed to spark interest in a wide range of audiences including high school students and undergraduate students majoring in not only STEM fields but also the humanities and arts. The MOOC contents will also be of great use to professors and instructors trying to apply the Flipped-Learning model in their classroom.
The leadership of these universities are leading at the front line of this innovative initiative by undertaking the creation and teaching of online courses themselves in the initial stage.
“As the jointly developed MOOC courses will bring the university faculty’s expertise and experiences, we hope that this initiative much contributes to enhancing youth’s foundation knowledge and popularizing science,” commented President Doh-Yeon Kim of POSTECH. “The collaboration of POSTECH, SNU, and KAIST could be a fresh stimulus to other universities.”
