About 100,000 people from more than 190 countries have already signed up for the Spanish and English versions.
This free course teaches the fundamentals of programming and software engineering using Scratch, a visual programming language developed in 2007 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which allows beginners to learn to program by dragging and dropping code blocks through a very simple graphical interface.
The two versions of the project were developed and produced independently in Uruguay and Scotland based on a common instructional design created by Dr. Inés Kereki, a professor of Computer Science at Universidad ORT Uruguay, and Dr. Areti Manataki, a researcher in Health Informatics and Academic Project Leader at the University of Edinburgh, an institution has in distance learning.
Students develop logical and computational thinking skills, learn the basics of programming, and acquire best practices by using the Scratch programming language to create animations and video games.
“The engaging nature of the course’s examples and projects is a great motivator for its target audience—high school students. It keeps them engaged in a friendly and fun way, sparking their interest in computer science,” explains Dr. Plinio Gañi, the project’s general coordinator.
This marks the first time that Universidad ORT Uruguay a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to a global audience.
Expectations exceeded
For weeks now, the course ¡A Programar! has been among the four most popular courses for Spanish speakers on the online learning platform Coursera, which was founded in 2011 by academics from Stanford University and where today the world’s leading universities and organizations offer free online training.
The first edition of the course took place from March 9 to April 12, 2015, while the on-demand version launched on August 10; unlike the previous edition, this format allows each student to take the course—in Spanish or English—at their own pace. To date, the two editions combined have attracted more than 100,000 registrants from all over the world.
“The course far exceeded our expectations, not only in terms of numbers but also based on the feedback from the satisfaction surveys, as 95% of participants said their expectations were met or exceeded, and 98% of them said they would recommend the course,” Gañi noted.
More than 60% of registered students are from Latin America. Mexico (20%) and Spain (20%) had the highest number of Spanish-speaking students, followed by Colombia (12%), the United States (7%), and Uruguay (6%).
Background
Universidad ORT Uruguay experience in distance education Universidad ORT Uruguay more than three decades ago, and its entry into the digital telecommunications era dates back to 1996, when the institution conducted the first nationwide session of a management development program via an interactive videoconference between Montevideo and the rest of the country.
In 2013, as part of the Ceibal Plan, the university launched Uruguay’s first MOOC, titled “Creating Games and Animations Using Scratch,” which was attended by more than 1,000 students and 200 high school teachers.
“The phenomenon of massive open online courses, while it has drawn mixed reactions of both support and opposition from the academic community, is a reality that cannot be ignored,” explains Gañi.
Universidad ORT Uruguay, which has always been a pioneer in the application of new teaching methodologies, could not remain oblivious to this phenomenon, which has been regarded as a disruptive change to traditional education—a field that has seen few major transformations over the past 100 years,” he adds.
Currently, Universidad ORT Uruguay assisting the University of São Paulo in developing a Portuguese version of ¡A Programar!, which will be available soon.