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Affiliates Letter
The official newsletter for FEMS Affiliates
Get Ready for the
EUROmicroMOOC!
The EUROmicroMOOC is a project by the Spanish Society for Microbiology (SEM)
and is supported by FEMS. It will be the first world-wide open access microbiology
course delivered through Twitter.
It runs from 2 October to 15 November, with three topics every week. 21
enthusiastic teachers will provide instruction and learning coordinated around the
hashtag: #EUROmicroMOOC (“micro” acknowledges both the subject under focus,
Microbiology, and the small 140-character format of a tweet; and “MOOC” stands
for Massive Online Open Course).
Lectures will be divided into 30-40 tweet sized statements with links to webpages,
blogs, news, and plenty of images and videos. The tweets go out at a rate of 1
tweet per minute, starting at 17:00 on the day of that course.
A Spanish Origin
EURO micro
MOOC at a
glance
• 21 courses, by 21
professors, from 18
institutions, in 9 countries
across the world
• classes scheduled every
Tuesday, Wednesday and
Thursday at 17:00 (CET)
from 2 October to
15 November
• tweets will be sent from
the @SEMicrobiologia
Twitter account
• each course consists
of 30-40 tweet sized
statements posted at
a rate of 1 tweet every
minute
• all classes will be in
English and the tweets
stored online using the
open tool Wakelet
This global version is the evolution of an idea that was initialised by Ignacio López-
Goñi in the midst of the Spanish Society for Microbiology. Their Teaching and
Dissemination of Microbiology Group created a twitter MOOC which aimed to
deliver microbiology lessons to as many people as possible.
In 2016, a team of 30 researchers from SEM - located in the US, UK, and Spain -
delivered 26 lessons on General Microbiology. The results were impressive: 175,000
people visited the SEM twitter account during the MOOC, the tweets reached a
device’s screen over 4 million times, and followers of the SEM account increased by
330%. 62% of the followers were located in Spain and 61% were female.
Delftechpark 37A, 2628 XJ Delft, The Netherlands
T: +31 15 302 0050 | E: [email protected]
SeptembeR 2018