International elite

The Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has joined edX, the most prestigious massive open online courses (MOOC) platform in the world.

This event officially consolidates the UPV as part of the international elite of free online teaching. Thus, in 2015, edX will offer 20 UPV courses, some of which have been previously included in the UPV’s MOOC offer, while others are new. However, it is not the UPV’s and edX’s intention to stop there: by the end of 2016, no less than 40 UPV MOOCs are expected to be available through edX.

A worldwide selection of prestigious universities including Harvard, MIT or Berkeley

Vicent Botti, the UPV's Vice-Rector for Information Technologies and Communications, emphasized that "joining edX means to be in the company of the most prestigious universities in the world, such as, among others, Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Kyoto University or the Institute of Technology in Zurich, all of them in the most reputed rankings' top 100."

"Getting the UPV into this select group", explained Botti, "is the result of years of work by professors and by the technicians of the Information and Communications Systems Office (ASIC-UPV), an effort that now allows us to be among the online education elite."

Botti also placed particular emphasis on the fact that the courses offered by the UPV will be verified by edX, "which brings an added value to the reputation of our certificates."

EdX’s courses have nearly three million unique users and more than six million registrations. Most students are from the United States (about 71%), followed by India, the UK, China, Brazil, Canada and Spain. By gender, 67% of users are male and 33% are female. And the average age of students is 32.

The UPV, Spain’s leader

By joining the edX platform, the UPV reasserts itself as Spain’s leader and a European benchmark in the field of massive online courses. The UPV offers more MOOCs than any other university in Spain (followed by the UNED –National Distance Education University– and the University of Cantabria). More than 150,000 students have already used the UPVx platform, and more than 20,000 of them have successfully completed the courses.

Since 2013, the UPV has launched more than 80 editions of its MOOCs, surpassing the figure of MOOCS offered by all European countries last year with the exception of the United Kingdom (85) and Spain itself (151), which is the continent’s benchmark country for this type of education.

In the coming weeks the UPV will further expand its offer with two new courses in upvx.es: Fundamentals of Electromagnetism for Studying Engineering, starting on December 1, and Chemical Reactions and Stoichiometric Calculations, which will begin on December 8.

The UPV, present at the creation of the multilingual MOOC experimental platform EMMA

Starting this academic year, the UPV is participating –along with seven other European universities– in the development of a multilingual MOOC experimental platform, called EMMA, which is funded by the European Union.

The UPV offers 2 of the 10 courses of EMMA' launch edition –Searching the Internet, and Excel 2010–, and also provides the technology that facilitates the transcription and translation of the courses to the various languages included in the platform.

• EdX's plataform
• UPV in edX
• UPVx's plataform
• MOOC experimental plataform EMMA