UQx online courses (MOOCs)

UQx offers a growing catalogue of online courses (MOOCs and MicroMasters® programs) in a variety of subjects.

Courses are designed for global learners looking at expanding their educational horizons, updating their professional expertise or sampling a prospective field of study.

Most courses are available on-demand (students can commence and complete them at any time). Others are available as archived courses between runs, where content is freely accessible but not the assessment.

edX is exploring the possibilities of thoughtfully designed online educational tools to leverage and complement the face-to-face learning experience. This transforms the way students interact with material, allowing more class time to engage in rich discussion.

UQ's partnership with edX enables us to significantly expand our global engagement, gives us access to exciting emerging technologies, rich sources of data and insights from consortium partners. This directly supports innovation among our teaching staff, enriches the student learning experience and how students interact with course material, their teachers and each other in in-class discussion.

As a result, UQ’s in-house capabilities for online and blended learning have rapidly matured with the Educational Media Production, Digital Learning Uplift and Learning Analytics teams.

A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course that attracts hundreds of thousands of learners around the world, has no admissions barrier and is fully online. MOOCs are usually free or very low cost to make them more accessible to global learners.

UQx draws upon UQ’s best teachers and researchers, and their international networks, to create courses that reflect UQ’s vision of knowledge leadership for a better world.

UQx's MOOCs follow an active, online learning pedagogy, featuring learning sequences that pair short, high-quality videos with learner-centred activities to assess understanding and encourage peer-to-peer engagement.

Some MOOCs – such as MicroMasters® programs – can be used as Shorter Form Credentials (SFCs).

Our MOOCs include paced, instructor-led courses and self-paced, always-available courses.

UQx MOOCs are released under Creative Commons licences that allow their use as open educational resources.

A SPOC is a Small Private Online Course using the MOOC design paradigm.

These courses, or portions of courses, are not publicly listed on edX. Instead, they are hosted on edX (Edge) and made available only to the intended audience.

They are open to a smaller audience, such as UQ students enrolled in for-credit campus courses, alumni, professional associations or a limited number of individuals whose enrolment meets a particular set of criteria.

UQx SPOCs are used in blended learning for UQ on-campus students, UQ research projects for study participants and for community service.

All UQx courses offer the option of a Verified Certificate for a small fee, some as low as US$50. These certificates require the use of an identity verification service, and the digital certificate can be linked to the student’s social media profile(s).

Some UQx courses are used in UQ on-campus programs. These have exemption for UQ students: this means that if they pass the assessment requirements, they receive a Verified Certificate which registers their participation and can be used to mark their on-campus course's record.

For further enquiries, please contact uqx@uq.edu.au.