Fostering Women to STEM MOOCs: a new EU funded project for gender-friendly MOOC design

In this webinar Paola Corti (Politecnico di Milano,Italy) and Ana Moura Santos (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal) are going to present a new Eu funded project, FOSTWOM, which aims at developing a gender-balance toolkit for MOOC design and development, in order to support females to take part in STEM careers. The Toolkit we are developing in the first year of the project will focus on designers and teaching staff involved in the development of STEM MOOC contents. It will support them in analysing existing STEM MOOCs so that they can realize if they are gender-balanced or not. Being that we are perfectly aware that updating a MOOC (in order to make it fit new points of attention, and gender is just one of them) is expensive and goes behind the development of everything new that is requested, our focus in the Toolkit will be also the design phase: we want more than ever to address instructional designers and teaching staff precisely when they design and prepare storyboards for their MOOCs, so that new MOOCs will have a chance to be better gender balanced in the future. The toolkit, thus, will contain very easy tools (like checklists, questions, example of situations, suggestions etc.) very quick to be used, also for content experts, so that they can start thinking about their MOOC taking gender into account. Our aim is to discuss with participants their perception of the needs around this, and the points of attention they might suggest us to take into account. Being that we are also developing CC licensed contents all along the project lifetime, including photo libraries of women at work in technical positions, the idea is that each result, also the smallest outcome achievable, will contribute to enrich Open Libraries of new, gender-balanced contents and reusable, adaptable tools.

The webinar will be hosted twice, in two different times, in order to take timezones into account and enlarge chances to participation at maximum. Registration is required in order to manage the two sessions at best and to collect a list of attendees. Thank you for joining us!