Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) (remote asynchronous)

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🎙 Keynote: Big ideas and modular curriculum design.
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Release summer ‘24  

Listen (or read) to discover more about the ‘fit for purpose’ framework.


Are you curious for more? Would you like to get in touch? Feel free to contact our lead directly for any questions or inquiries you may have. tikvah@studioblended.com +31 6 42 47 29 69

Imagine, the sheer scale of reach you have, and dissemintation of your big ideas and practice, once you have a MOOC. Imagine, taking the opportunity of developing a MOOC in sync with developing high quality products, such as videos, which your staff can then use across the bandwith of your operations, including other courses and degrees, presentations and beyond. Or, imagine having a MOOC that complements and invigorates the course or degree you’re offering with high quality modules, perhaps to consolidate students’ basic knowledge on certain issues.

StudioBlended has been involved with MOOCs since the early pioneering stages at universities, and our approach has always been a modular one. 

You’re usually dealing with a team; we work with high quality, and maximum simplicity. We come alongside you as an external indepenent senior advisor, and partner with you to get things done.



A MOOC takes your knowledge domain into a learning platform online, and is in principle accessible for many because it is for free, whilst often time learners pay a small amount for obtaining a certificate issued by your institute. Depending on your ambition, we are talking about some 5,000 to hunderds of thousands of learners over a couple of years - but you may also want to actually have a smaller impactful scope.

A MOOC can be a great way to capitalise on a program that is about to end, and allow its insights, materials and value to have an impact well into the near future whilst making it more accessible for a wider and more diverse audience.

We only work bespoke with our clients. And so, within the traditional MOOC format, and the possibilities and limitations of technology (mainly your learning platform), we can always become playful, and co-create with you a bespoke approach. 

Our approach is both technical, and pedagogical.

StudioBlended stands out by offering you a fully modular curriculum design. We will always encourage you to go modular. What is your ambition for your investment? The MOOC is an excellent opportunity to create very high quality products, and can be developed to maximalise its usage, not just for the MOOC itself, but also into other courses, advertisement/marketing, lectures and beyond into dissemination, client work and usages you cannot even begin to imagine yet now. Our modular approach also allows for flexibilisation, and differentiation in the MOOC.



Usually a MOOC is unfacilitated - meaning there is no teaching staff present. But we can be inventive, and build in moments of contact, whether this is in virtual peer exchange, in certain dialogues with your lecturers/researchers/projectteam, or in meaningful assessment that goes beyond automated assessment. Obviously that depends on whether you still have project/progam funding for the staff - alternatively, the MOOC can stay out there unfacilitated for up to a decade.

Creating a MOOC requires a careful approach, as once the end product is there, it’s in principle static for years to come.

As part of the initial scoping with you, we will ensure essential parameters for the online course. One of them, is audience. The other one is envisioning what success looks like: what behavioral change do you wish to see in your audience?

It is only possible to have a decade proof MOOC content-wise - if you design for that. Have a look at our Design Studio to discover how we do that. The timeless and decade-robust ‘fit for purpose framework’ we offer you, ensures you will be able to use the modules well into the future. We further invigorate and amplify your curriculum, with world class pedagogy that resonates authentically with the course envisioned - it’s always bespoke design, never a copy paste from other MOOCs.



After design, we develop the learning journey for you in the selected learning management system. We co-create the various modules with the relevant staff members of your team. We ensure meaningful activation in workformat, such as virtual peer exchange - with fellow students, or with an AI discussant (if your learning platform allows for it). 

Contrary to more traditional project managment approaches you often see in academia, we follow a rapid development process per module in your course with you (r team). Basically, the idea is that we do a draft of Module A in your course. Whilst that is being reviewed, we work on Module B - and so on, successively. We cannot stress enough the importance of a clear and rapid review process, especially in academia or projects where there are a lot of (content) stakeholders involved in giving feedback and deadlines tend to be prolongued. Curious on how a rapid development process can work effectively for you? Feel free to contact us for more details.

Our approach involves collaborations from within our pool of international highly skilled and qualified experts. We also readily and beautifully create impactful collaborations with other experts in the field, where relevant for certain components of your MOOC and do not shy away from making the right connections with experts, for the sake of helping you reach a beautiful end product, and actually a lot of collective co-creation and growth within your team to increase impact.

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) seems wide spread, but at the same time, we still see quite a bit of resistance to it within universities and beyond. Perhaps mainly because it is by default, unfacilitated - there is no teaching staff, and it is at scale. But a MOOC can be a wonderful approach. Why don’t you give us a call to discover more and tell us your needs, fears, problems and hopes?

Partnering

We come alongside a client, and operate as equal partners throughout the project duration of an advisory assignment.

Our senior advisors expect to have an equal partner relationship with the client’s main focal point (i.e. a coordinator), whereby client and advisor work together, combining the advisor’s specialist knowledge with relevant knowledge about the content, the organisation and access to the relevant departments.

Shared responsibility and joint decision making for the sake of ownership, allow the success and relevance of the identified outcomes and outputs.

Timeline

For the timeline much depends on whether you are an academic institution, or otherwise.

For academia, our experience is that we need at last some 8 months from initiation to delivering the end product of a fully operational MOOC. Much has to do with the tempo in which decisions are made, insights about the knowledge domain are included, team alignment and sign off processes.

In principle, with effective teamwork with your own project manager, we can deliver within 6 months.

Price

The price of a fully operational MOOC much depends on what you aspire.

The price indication we give below is purely for the component of StudioBlended, in curriculum design, development and project management. In other words, any video production, editing, graphic design etc is calculated seperately as a seperate contract with a freelancer from our pool.

Price range: €25.000 - €75.000 (excl. VAT, excl. travelcosts) for a smaller MOOC in terms of aspired scale (up to some 5,000 users over a period of 5 years). In this category, we are very inventive with any limitations you may have, and the output is a quite straightforward product, robust however in technical design and pedagogy. For this price range we rely heavily also on your own in-house expertise in development of modules in the software, and time availability.

For a larger scale MOOC (over 10.000 users) the sum will be significantly higher, related also to the platforms used and the level of interaction and sound e-learning qualities included (read: more “fancy” tools are used for the learner).

This price range is just a rough indication, please contact us directly for a dialogue, a scoping based on an initial set of essential parameters . On the basis thereof we can offer you a bespoke quotation. We also recommend our envisioning workshop.

Key projects

StudioBlended is currently partnering with an institute for capacity building within a European University, to co-create an impactful MOOC for this client (2025-June 2026). The MOOC is built into  the Coursera learning management system.

European funded program.

More information follows soon.



As early as 2013, the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) was an early adopter of MOOCs, and invested in experiments.
Upon invitation by the head of Education, our independent senior advisor (then staff member) delivered a proposal called ‘Training as a product - A suggestion’. The proposal included a suggestion for an ‘open building’ training product offered by this institute for capacity building/development.
The proposal dates back to 2014, but is still decade strong and relevant today, and resonates in all our technical design.

More design angles we use

Technical resilience
Human resilience
Modular
Time dimension
Evidence-based design
Financial health and resilience by (re)design
Innovative and deep pedagogy
Assesment / evaluation
Multi- Inter- and transdisciplinary
Blended
Bichronous
MOOC
Designed to be green (and technological simplicity)
Nature and aspirations
Flexibilisation and personalisation
Simplicity and decluttering

We are here especially for you as unique professional, to come alongside you and partner with you, as you work on a (architecture / urban / development / policy / land / water / climate) curriculum, so that you can offer effective and resilient education in its simplest form.