Today, January 7, 2019, the MOOC titled Essential skills for museum professionals was launched worldwide. The MOOC was developed by the DAISSy research team of HOU as part of the European Mu.SA project: Museum Sector Alliance in collaboration with the project partners. The Mu.SA project is co-ordinated by Dr. Achilleas Kameas, Professor of Hellenic Open University and is implemented in 4 European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Belgium) by 12 organizations.

The MOOC aims at enhancing the digital skills and 21st century skills of museum and cultural professionals. To this end, it consists of training modules based on the European e-competences framework (e-CF), DigComp and P21 – in fact the course is a unique combination of these standards, and for this reason it is considered as best practice at European level. The instructional design was based on learning outcomes and is modular in order to allow each trainee to study based on his / her pace and availability. The MOOC extends to 8 weeks of training and requires a total of 80 hours of training and study. Each week, it focuses on 1 e-CF competence (a European standard of IT skills) and combines competences from DigComp (the global standard of digital literacy of the average citizen) and P21 (a 21st century skill model) frameworks. For each competence, a separate training module has been designed, the material of which is grouped in units.

Each unit includes presentations, videos and study material related to a set of learning outcomes that are assessed at the end. The training material has been produced in its entirety by the organizations involved in the project and is available in 4 languages: English, Greek, Italian and Portuguese. During the course there will be training support from tutors who have also planned participatory activities to be implemented through forums and social media. The training platform was developed by the DAISSy team of HOU and is available at https://mooc.cti.gr/.

Up to now, more than 5,200 people have registered in the course from all around the world! We hope they will find the course interesting and will persist until they complete it.