A Multimedia-Rich Wikiversity MOOC from Brazil
Author: Miréia Figueiredo
Social Media channels or hashtags: Multimedia, Wikiversity, Science Journalism, Open Educational Resources, Brazil
Summary: This article brings up the case of an introductory course for scientific journalism produced with various multimedia resources on Wikiversity in Portuguese.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a lot of schools and educational institutions to adapt to distance learning. Despite this circumstance, studies of alternative ways of creating and spreading knowledge on the internet have been carried out for a long time. This type of research strengthens and contributes to disseminating initiatives like Wikiversity.
I work as a journalism researcher at the RIDC NeuroMat (the Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics), developing an introductory course for scientific journalism on Wikiversity in Portuguese. My activity is supported by FAPESP (the São Paulo Research Foundation), and the development is carried out with Wiki Movimento Brasil. The course was created in 2017, by the NeuroMat researcher Daniel Dieb, and is about to be completed. This course was the basis of a scientific article (in Portuguese), on how Wikiversity may lead to improving learning experiences.
To prepare class contents, researchers from NeuroMat and partner institutions were interviewed. Classes also present quizzes and audiovisual resources to promote an even more connected experience to students. Actually, this is one of the great intentions of this project: emphasize one of the Wikiversity goals of creating a collaborative knowledge space. At the end of each module, there is a recommended activity. Students can discuss with each other to share their doubts and comments.
This is an innovative course as long as it combines different multimedia resources. The majority of the available courses on Wikiversity are guidelines for onsite classes, with links directing to other web contents, with almost no video or image, only texts. An example of our multimedia-rich approach is one recommended activity in which students are requested to edit Science History articles on Wikipedia in Portuguese. In this sense, this is an opportunity for the students to explore their abilities in many platforms and various formats.