DTU Library has, in cooperation with
Copenhagen University Library developed and launched the world's first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on academic information seeking. The course contributes to DTU’s ambition to digitize training, where the aim is each year to increase the number of MOOCs offered on Coursera.
The MOOC ‘Academic Information seeking’ is developed with the specific purpose of being available in an on-demand format. This means that you can follow the course when and wherever you want—independent of time and place. Time, pace, and order is determined by the individual student.
The course is divided into three modules with a total of 21 short videos covering a wide range of information searches: how to limit and prepare your information seeking, the various search methods you can use, and how best to quality assess and document the selected and applied information in connection with the writing of academic assignments.
Many of the videos include exercises that help the students define and adapt their information seeking to the exact conditions and contexts applying to the individual student. Each of the three modules will be concluded with a quiz which must be completed in order to pass the course.
The course experiments with a model that supports that the scientific information which DTU and other universities all over the world each year purchase for the benefit of education and research is also integrated in and adds value to the University’s e-learning. In short, the model involves that you as a lecturer create a group in the Mendeley reference tool. In the course, you then place a link to the group which the course participants can register for, and via link resolving the individual participants can find out if their own university library has purchased access to the books, articles, or other items included in the course’s list of references.
Since the launch mid-December 2015, 1,600 have signed up for the course. The course participants come from more than 120 different countries all over the world and several have expressed that the course has given them competencies and knowledge they have been able to use in connection with their studies and research.