MOOCS AND BRAZILIAN PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: an overview of the 2024 offerings

Abstract

University Outreach promotes the sharing of knowledge and the development of solutions in partnership with society to address increasingly complex challenges posed by reality. By combining the transformative potential of outreach programs with the possibilities of distance education, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) represent another opportunity for dialogue between universities and society. In Brazil, public and private higher education institutions have adopted MOOCs as a strategy to expand their outreach activities, reaching not only local communities but also broader segments of society interested in the themes covered by these courses. This article aims to describe the main characteristics of MOOCs offerings by public higher education institutions in Brazil through the analysis of latent corpora available on the internet. Within the temporal scope of the research, it was possible to identify 45 Brazilian public higher education institutions offering MOOCs to society, totaling 1805 learning experiences in this format. Among the institutions offering MOOCs, the following stood out: IFRS, UFRN, UFSCAR, IFES, UFRGS, IFSul e UEMA, whose combined MOOC offerings represent 70,58% of the courses identified in the survey.