Toolkit of Good Practices for Gender Balance in MOOCs

A MOOC is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web and nowadays it often includes validated academic content designed and produced by faculty members and MOOC teams located at Universities. Within the FOSTWOM consortium, almost all HEI partners are MOOC producers with online courses designed in a multidisciplinary collaboration between teaching staff and the development team. Tutors, instructional designers, graphic designers and video editors, ideate and design the STEM content according to the pedagogical-scientific model of each online course (Moura Santos & Fleming, 2020). It is our responsibility as MOOC developers and designers to promote gender equality and provide better opportunities for MOOC participants to access high quality content in a gender-balanced environment. In addition, the virtual classroom offered by MOOCs may provide a more comfortable learning space for many female students (Lee et al., 2017). The free and easy access to the online courses provided by universities may be providing opportunities for female participants to take STEM courses, especially females from less gender-egalitarian and less economically developed countries. Therefore, we have developed a toolkit to support MOOC stakeholders (content experts, MOOCs’ team development members, participants/students) not only in analysing existing STEM MOOCs so that they can raise their awareness on biases, but also in helping them to contribute to future STEM MOOCs free of gender stereotypes. More specifically, the FOSTWOM toolkit provide tools to: ● Make women working in the STEM subjects, researchers and other role models more visible; ● Make women involved in STEM MOOCs, female teachers, professors and lecturers more visible; ● Avoid gender stereotypes in STEM content and activities; ● Use inclusive graphic design: images, colors, avatars and videos, that break gender norms and do not aimed solely at male participants; ● Use real-life applications of relevant content for STEM careers, which include both women and men; ● Design assessment and learning activities in a gender-conscious way; ● Make visible the diversity and variety of competencies (both soft and hard skills) and representations needed among practitioners in the STEM area; ● Promote a gender equality discourse that highlights and problematizes women's under-representation in STEM, and points to the consequences it may have for problem formulation (eg risk of lack of a broad user perspective), product design, research, innovation, etc