I can hardly believe that after more than a year of preparations, the junior MOOC (online academic course for children in the last grades of primary school) is about to launch. This intensive collaboration between seven academics (one of them: me) and the Scholierenacademie of the University of Groningen has resulted in an awesome product! In April, the first lessons will become available, in which Diederik Roest will teach about the universe and why a day lasts 24 hours, Martine Maan will explain what animal and plant species are and how difficult it can be to distinguish them and I will talk about ‘Mensen in alle maten’ and explain how we can determine what a normal height is for an 11-year old. And this is only the beginning! We also have Jacob Jolij talking about attention and how magician’s play with your limitations in this respect, Mladen Popovic about the dead see scrolls and writing history, Rosalie Koolhoven about the law and how ownership of something you find in the street is determined, and last but not least, Jan Willem Romeijn about philosophy: how do we know that what we know is true?
There has been so much publicity already about our initiative, by RTV Noord, BNR, Dagblad van het Noorden, Omrop Fryslan, Stand van Stad, and more than 300 applications of schools (often with multiple classes) have been received. I now look forward to the first questions and responses by the pupils!
All details can be found here.
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