Firefox OS/Community/Hungary/Education/Courses/Firefox OS
The Firefox OS MOOC course is one of the first projects in the Hungarian Mozilla/Firefox OS community to try and get Open Web education (via Firefox OS) into Hungarian universities.
The project was founded by Krisztián Karóczkai in 2013 who started the first Firefox OS MOOC course at Óbuda University, in Budapest, Hungary.
MOOC?
MOOC is the initialism „Massive Open Online Courses”, and describes online courses available online for free, for a wide audience to provide accessible, open information and opportunity for learning. There are several MOOC providers already, operating worldwide (like edX, Coursera or Udacity).
The Firefox OS course is part of the regional K-MOOC platform, a Hungarian-language MOOC platform operated by Óbuda University. The K-MOOC platform is expected to serve any and all higher education institutions (colleges & universities alike) in the Carpathian Basin where the language of teaching is Hungarian with online courses in diverse topics from jazz through ergonomics & pedagogy to computer sciences and programming. K-MOOC courses are available to students of 16 Hungarian higher education institutions and in 13 additional institutions in 5 countries in Central & Eastern-Europe (as of July 2015).
The Firefox OS course has been growing in reach since its start and is expected to launch in at least 6 Hungarian institutions for the 2015/2016 fall semester, with discussions with additional institutes still ongoing.
History
The Firefox OS MOOC course (titled „Mobil alkalmazás fejlesztés FirefoxOS platformon” mobile application development on the Firefox OS platform) was first announced by Krisztián Karóczkai and Kálmán Szalai at Webkonferencia 2013, and launched the next semester, in the February of 2014 at Óbuda University.
Current work: 2015/2016 fall semester
The 2015/2016 iteration of the Firefox OS course will be the 4th semester since the project's starting date in early 2014.
In the current semester we face several challenges as we start to transition the project from its previous, experimental phase into a more structured and more organized pilot semester. With the experience gathered in the previous runs and due to the growing number of participating institutions, we have to scale the project and put it to a sustainable trajectory. We also need to start developing more versatile, localizable course materials that could then be picked up by non-hungarian-speaking communities and address challenges of the changing Firefox OS architecture and ecosystem.
Read more on the course structure and challenges below: