Abstract
The Finnish primary school curriculum will feature programming and computational thinking as mandatory cross-curricular elements in all teaching starting from the first grade. Many teachers are quite concerned about this and feel ill-prepared. A group of volunteers created a MOOC for teachers and, with no budget, trained over 500 primary school teachers to be competent teachers of programming (38% of the participants). The results from a study conducted within the course indicate that Finnish teachers seem to think that coding is an important addition to the school curriculum and they exhibit low levels of anxiety over it. The MOOC design focused on connectivist design principles (cMOOC) and was considered extremely successful by the participants. The MOOC participants seemed confident that the MOOC would equip them to face the new challenge, and indeed, the feedback from the MOOC and its results support this.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the invaluable individuals who volunteered to be teachers in the MOOC—to prepare the weekly schedules and materials, to give feedback and support, and to do all of these in their free time: Tero Toivanen, special needs teacher and teacher trainer; Vuokko Kangas, lower primary school class teacher; and Tiina Partanen, upper primary school mathematics teacher.
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Toikkanen, T., Leinonen, T. (2017). The Code ABC MOOC: Experiences from a Coding and Computational Thinking MOOC for Finnish Primary School Teachers. In: Rich, P., Hodges, C. (eds) Emerging Research, Practice, and Policy on Computational Thinking. Educational Communications and Technology: Issues and Innovations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52691-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52691-1_15
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