Category Archives: Course

New free online course: Childbirth – A Global Perspective

Posted on September 21, 2014 | 2 comments

pregnancy1This free course provides a broad overview of maternal and newborn health issues facing low-income and transitional countries, where more than 2.6 million babies are stillborn and nearly 500,000 women die during childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications each year.

Childbirth: A Global Perspective, is a new MOOC (massive open online course) by Emory University on the Coursera platform from 1 Oct – 19 Nov 2014. It requires 2-4 hours of study time per week for 6 weeks, a total of 12-24 hours overall. The course is free to study, and a Statement of Accomplishment is available.

The syllabus is:
Week 1: Introduction to Maternal Mortality and Morbidity in the Global Context
Week 2: Introduction to Maternal Mortality and Morbidity in the US Context
Week 3: The Impact of the Health Care Workforce Shortage on Maternal and Newborn Care
Week 4: Emergency Obstetric Care: Health Facility Services that Support Maternal Health and Survival
Week 5: Improving Maternal and Newborn Care through Community-Based Interventions
Week 6: Case Study in Ethiopia: Educating the Community and Training Front-Line Community Health Workers to Deliver Maternal and Newborn Care

MOOCs are free web-based courses designed for large numbers of participants. Anyone wanting to take a MOOC simply goes to the website and signs up. Typical MOOCs comprise video lectures, readings, quizzes and exchanges with instructors and fellow participants in online forums. Coursera is the biggest player in the global MOOC movement, and so far more than 7 million students from nearly 200 countries have registered to take nearly 600 Coursera classes from participating institutions.

index2If you are interested in pregnancy and childbirth, you may also like to take a look at the free Midwifery course by Australia’s University of Newcastle on another MOOC provider, open2study. The midwifery course covers the history of the profession and what it means to be a midwife today. It is delivered repeatedly throughout the year, requiring 2-4 hours of study time per week for 4 weeks, a total of 8-16 hours overall. Like the Childbirth course above, a Certificate of Achievement is available.

2 Comments

Posted in Course

Tagged

Exploring Play – a new free online course

Posted on July 1, 2014 | 20 comments

The approach of UK Playday is a good reason to look at a new MOOC (massive open online course) on Play.

hero_4eca714f-1f05-4154-a293-0247e0a7d533Exploring Play: The Role of Play in Everyday Life, is a seven week long course beginning on 29 September 2014. It aims to help us to think differently about play, and discover why something that is so often taken for granted is actually very important and significant to us all.
The course is offered by the University of Sheffield on the attractive FutureLearn platform, and is led by respected Professor Elizabeth Wood. It requires 4 hours of study time per week, a total of 28 hours overall. The course is free to study, and if required, a Certificate of Participation is available at £25. The course will be of interest if you wish to work or study in the fields of psychology, playwork, childhood studies, play therapy, hospital play, teaching, childcare, or if you just want to better understand your relationship with your own children and your own play.

playday logoBefore then, UK Playday is Wednesday 6th August this year, with a theme of ‘the Importance of Play’. On Playday thousands of children and their families get out to play at hundreds of community events across the UK. The Playday 2014 website is live, so organisations can start registering their events, and individuals can begin planning their days – there are lots of ways to get involved!

20 Comments

Posted in Course

Tagged

New Childhood MOOCs – two free online courses for Summer 2014

Posted on May 1, 2014 | 2 comments

Two new MOOCs (massive open online courses) from the US and the UK are launching soon. Is one of them right for you?

Back in October 2013 I looked at the MOOCs Early Childhood Education by Gowrie Victoria on www.open2study.com, and Effective Classroom Interactions by the University of Virginia on www.coursera.org. This year there are two more options to choose from:

coursera-logo-nobg1. The Clinical Psychology of Children and Young People by the University of Edinburgh on Coursera.
This is a five week long course beginning on 28 July 2014. It requires between 1-3 hours of work per week, a total of 5-15 hours overall. The course is led by Professor Matthias Schwannauer, and offers a broad introduction to the core models of psychological development and the practice of the Clinical Psychology of Children and Young People. You don’t need to be working with children to study this course, and students who successfully complete it will receive a signed Statement of Accomplishment. The syllabus is:
Week 1: What is Development
Week 2: Attachment
Week 3: Risk and Resilience
Week 4: The Psychology of Adolescence
Week 5: Applied Developmental Psychopathology

EdX_Logo2. Positive Behavior Support for Young Children by The University of Washington on EdX.
This is a nine week long course beginning on 10 June 2014. It requires between 3-4 hours per week, a total of 30-35 hours overall. The course is led by Dr. Gail Joseph and will teach evidence-based models to promote social-emotional development for young children. The course is aimed at early childhood educators (also known as early years practitioners) already working with young children. As part of the course you will analyse the behavior one of your children in detail, working towards the outcome of learning classroom management skills that prevent challenging behavior. No certificates will be issued with this course.

Which course should you choose?
If you’ve not studied a MOOC before, Clinical Psychology of Children and Young People should be a good place to start, particularly if you’re interested in older children. It covers a wider age-range and is less skills-orientated, so you don’t need to be a current practitioner. In contrast, Positive Behavior Support for Young Children is a longer and more advanced course, so if you studied either of the MOOCs I reviewed last year, then this would be an ideal follow-on course. I’d summarise their relative positions like this:

Introductory level:

Early Childhood Education by Gowrie Victoria

Clinical Psychology of CYP by Edinburgh

Practitioner level:

Effective Classroom Interactions by Virginia

Positive Behavior Support by Washington

Interestingly, with edX, we now have a third platform in the mix. One analogy is with supermarkets; the four courses above are equivalent to products you might want, but which supermarket you choose to get it from can make quite a difference to your experience. So far I have preferred the Australian open2study platform over Coursera, as it’s more fun to use and the students achieve better results. However, I’m really looking forward to trying edX, not least because it is the only major platform that is nonprofit and open-source, which sits comfortably with my own attitude that education should be more of a human right than a commercial commodity.​

2 Comments

Posted in Course

Tagged , ,