MOOC UNAM

What MOOC UNAM is

MOOC UNAM is the open online course program of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, delivered on Coursera. The site's own tagline is "Capacítate gratis con la UNAM y Coursera" (train for free with UNAM and Coursera), and its landing page invites visitors to discover more than 162 UNAM courses that can be taken at any time, worked through at the learner's own pace, alongside students from around the world. The data section gives a slightly more precise count: 161 courses currently available, produced by more than 46 entities of the university.

The site explains the format in plain terms. A MOOC, it says, is an online course format that lets you study a wide range of topics at whatever pace you set. MOOC UNAM is therefore a learner product: a catalog of university courses open to the public, rather than a tool for building or selling courses.

Two ways in

The site describes two routes, and which one applies changes what a learner gets.

The first is for the UNAM community. Students, professors and employees of the university can join the Coursera para la UNAM program, which the site says gives them free access to more than 4000 courses from prestigious universities, with a certificate, as well as every course UNAM itself has developed. Access runs through a UNAM email account, and the site links to a form for anyone in the community who does not yet have one.

The second is for everyone else. The site tells the general public to sign up on Coursera.org, the platform that hosts the courses. The site does not list certificate prices for learners outside the UNAM community.

Support is split by topic. Questions about UNAM email accounts go to soporte@comunidad.unam.mx, and questions about the MOOCs themselves go to mooc.unam@cuaed.unam.mx.

Scale and audience

The program publishes its numbers openly. The site reports more than 6.1 million enrollments worldwide in UNAM's MOOCs, and a banner marks the moment the courses passed 6 million enrollments. Globally, the data section adds, UNAM's courses have reached more than 4,334,000 unique students. Within the Coursera para la UNAM program for the university's own community, the site counts more than 79 mil (79,000) unique students who have put in more than 1,337,000 hours of learning.

The site also breaks down who takes the courses: 44% women and 56% men, with the largest age groups being 25 to 34, then 35 to 44, then 45 to 54. On Coursera as a whole, it adds, Mexico ranks third by number of students (4.37%), behind the United States (18.78%) and India (17.12%).

The catalog

The course list is long and deliberately broad, and several courses are grouped into programas especializados, multi-course programs that end in a final project.

Business and management. This is the largest block. A negotiation program runs through four courses, from the basics of a negotiation to its obstacles and strategies, and closes with a final project built on a real workplace-climate case. A corporate finance program covers financial administration, financial mathematics, capital budgeting, capital structure and dividend policy (including WACC, CAPM and APT), and business valuation, ending with a course that asks learners to integrate the five previous ones in a simulated investment and financing decision. Further courses cover strategy, markets, quality, leadership, human talent management, time management, problem solving, accounting for non-accountants, personal finance, and credit and collections.

Programming and data. An Android program starts with Java for Android apps, moves through Android Studio fundamentals, Activities, Fragments and storage from a single file up to a database, and its advanced course covers uploading an app to the Google Play Store before a final project. A separate Introducción a Java course works through five modules, from object orientation and responsibility cards to arrays and Java's memory model. There is an introduction to data science with R, ggplot2 and RStudio. Four data courses carry English titles: Relational database systems and Business intelligence and data warehousing each run six weeks with videos and documents, covering SQL, MySQL, RapidMiner, Hadoop and Map-Reduce jobs on HDFS; NoSQL systems covers key-value, columnar, document and graph databases; and Designing data-intensive applications runs four weeks with videos and exercises.

Artificial intelligence. The AI courses include Sesenta años de inteligencia artificial, which covers the field's past, present and future and its social, ethical and philosophical implications, along with courses on artificial reasoning, problem solving by search, evolutionary computation and adaptive behavior. The final project of the Introducción a la Inteligencia Artificial program has learners write a software program and a structured essay of at most 10 pages, graded by their peers.

Music technology with free software. A seven-course program uses open-source tools: two courses on music production in Ardour (one ends with a mastered recording ready for distribution and covers choosing and positioning microphones), three on programming languages for music (Pure Data, Supercollider and Arduino), one on collaborative music, and a final project. The site says it is aimed both at newcomers to digital music-making and at musicians who want to widen their professional tools.

Health sciences. Courses include pharmacology for dentists, the modern non-invasive management of dental caries, hospital wound care, peritoneal dialysis, nutrition and obesity, ocular pharmacovigilance, type 2 diabetes care, prostate cancer, and resolving ethical conflicts in clinical cases.

Science, teaching and society. The list also covers basic algebra, trigonometry, statistics, chemistry at home and in food and medicine production, the seasons and climate (taught with visual simulations and suggested experiments), Charles Darwin, robotics, automatic control, and an Arduino course that builds a cyclist's vest and a pill box with no programming background required. Teachers get an assessment-for-learning program that ends in a three-week electronic portfolio, plus courses on design thinking in teaching and on using film in class. Civic topics include anticorruption, disaster risk management, water security, the commons, digital journalism and fake news, building your own home in two parts, and a course on local governments as international actors, developed with the government of Ciudad de México and the AL-LAs city network.

How the courses work

The site stresses self-paced study: courses can be started at any time and taken at the learner's own rhythm. The course descriptions show the usual building blocks of the format, with videos, documents, exercises, modules and final projects, and in the AI program, peer assessment. One course, Cómo hacer una tesis, is aimed at students finishing a degree and says it will help them complete a thesis in six months. The site and its course descriptions are written in Spanish, including those of the data courses with English titles, so a learner should be comfortable reading Spanish.

Who it suits

MOOC UNAM suits Spanish-reading learners who want university courses across a very wide spread of subjects, from Android development and data warehousing to dental care, negotiation and music production, in a program the site frames as open and free; a banner thanks learners for believing in the power of open, free knowledge for everyone. The specialized programs give more structure than a single course, which helps anyone who wants a sequence that ends in a project. For UNAM students, professors and staff, the Coursera para la UNAM program is the standout: free certificates across more than 4000 courses from other universities as well as UNAM's own. The main caveat is that the site is a portal into Coursera rather than a platform of its own, so enrollment, course pages and certificate terms for the general public all sit on Coursera.org.