The EUROmicroMOOC is a project that the Spanish Society for Microbiology (SEM) started with support from FEMS. It is the first world-wide open access microbiology course delivered through Twitter.
It runs from 2 October to 15 November, with three topics every week. 21 enthusiastic teachers will provide instruction and learning coordinated around the hashtag: #EUROmicroMOOC
In this context “micro” acknowledges both the subject under focus, microbiology, and also the small 140-character format of a tweet, whereas “MOOC” stands for Massive Online Open Course).
The lectures have each divided their course into 30-40 tweet sized statements, with links to webpages, blogs, news, and plenty of images and videos. Starting at 17:00 UCT/GMT+2 on the day of that course, the tweets go out at a rate of 1 tweet per minute.
For the 2018 edition:
- 21 courses, by 21 professors, from 18 institutions, in 9 countries across the world
- classes scheduled every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 17:00 (CET) from 2 October to 15 November
- tweets will be sent from the @SEMicrobiologia Twitter account
- each course consists of 30-40 tweet sized statements posted at a rate of 1 tweet every minute
- all classes will be in English and the tweets stored online using the open tool Wakelet
The 21 courses will be delivered across the 7 week project through the @SEMicrobiologia Twitter account, with more details found here.
A Spanish Origin
This global version is the evolution of an idea that was initialised by Ignacio López-Goñi in the midst of the SEM. Their Teaching and Dissemination of Microbiology Group created a twitter MOOC which aimed to deliver microbiology lessons to as many people as possible.
In 2016, a team of 30 researchers from SEM – located in the US, UK, and Spain – delivered 26 lessons on General Microbiology.
The results were impressive: 175,000 people visited the SEM twitter account during the MOOC, the tweets reached a device’s screen over 4 million times, and followers of the SEM account increased by 330%. 62% of the followers were located in Spain and 61% were female.
A second edition was organised in 2017. This edition was aimed at the wider Spanish speaking world, across South America, Mexico, and the USA (and did so successfully, 42% of the audience reached were from these countries).
Courses on Offer
Although all courses will be delivered through the @SEMicrobiologia Twitter account, you can also use the information below to check out the teachers involved and the courses on offer for the global 2018 version:
Science Communication
Teacher: Tarsha Sturm
Institution: Cabrillo College (USA)
Twitter profile: @tasturm1
Date: 2 October
Bacterial surface structures
Teacher: Jenny-Lee Thomassin
Institution: Institut Pasteur (France)
Twitter profile: @JennyThomassin
Date: 3 October
Bacterial biofilms
Teacher: Akos T. Kovacs
Institution: DTU Bioengineering (Denmark)
Twitter profile: @EvolvedBiofilm
Date: 4 October
Bacterial cooperation
Teacher: Elisa Granato
Institution: University of Oxford (England)
Twitter profile: @Prokaryota
Date: 9 October
Space microbiology
Teacher: Marta Cotesao
Institution: German Aerospace Center-DLR (Germany)
Twitter profile: @martacortesao
Date: 10 October
Food pathogens
Teacher: Joaquin Giner
Institution: Centro Nacional de Biotecnología CNB-CSIC (Spain)
Twitter profile: @Ginerorama
Date: 11 October
Food microbiome
Teacher: Avelino Alvarez-Ordoñez
Institution: University of León (Spain)
Twitter profile: @MetaResistantB
Date: 16 October
Gut microbiota
Teacher: Thibault Sana
Institution: Stanford University (USA)
Twitter profile: @ThibGSana
Date: 17 October
Antibiotic production
Teacher: Dennis Claessen
Institution: Leiden University (The Netherlands)
Twitter profile: @ClassenLAB
Date: 18 October
Antimicrobial resistance
Teacher: Wiep Klaas Smits
Institution: Leiden University (The Netherlands)
Twitter profile: @SmitsLab
Date: 23 October
Bacteriophages
Teacher: Andrea Dreusch
Institution: MicroMol GmbH Laboratory (Germany)
Twitter profile: @MicroMol_Lab
Date: 24 October
Microbiological warfare
Teacher: Daniel García
Institution: University of Salamanca (Spain)
Twitter profile: @SoyBiotec
Date: 25 October
#Vaccineswork
Teacher: Ignacio López-Goñi
Institution: University of Navarra (Spain)
Twitter profile: @microbioblog
Date: 30 October
Microbial genomics
Teacher: Alfonso Benitez-Paez
Institution: Instituto de Agroquímica y Tecnología de Alimentos IATA-CSIC (Spain)
Twitter profile: @alfbenpa
Date: 31 October
Mobile genetic elements
Teacher: María del Toro Hernando
Institution: Fundación Rioja Salud (Spain)
Twitter profile: @Miss_Salmonella
Date: 1 November
Microbial synthetic biology
Teacher: Kris Niño G. Valdehuesa
Institution: Myongji University (South Korea)
Twitter profile: @krisnino86
Date: 6 November
Industrial microbiology
Teacher: Manuel Sánchez
Institution: University of Miguel Hernández (Spain)
Twitter profile: @ManoloSanchezA
Date: 7 November
Virulence and pathogenicity
Teacher: Jesus L. Romalde
Institution: University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
Twitter profile: @baylorete / @gimikrobios
Date: 8 November
Bacterial pathogenomics
Teacher: Marta Zapotoczna
Institution: Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Science (Poland)
Twitter profile: @MartaZapotoczna
Date: 13 November
The microbial path to cancer
Teacher: Jorge Garcia-Lara
Institution: University of Central Lancashire (UK)
Twitter profile: @GarciaLaraClan
Date: 14 November
Thinking outside the box
Teacher: Félix Sangari
Institution: Instituto de Biomedicina y Biotecnologia IBBTEC (Spain)
Twitter profile: @LaMicroMola
Date: 15 November
More details here.