The EMMA MOOC “Mobile Devices in Everyday Life” took place from May to June 2015. It was the second MOOC the Tallinn University provided on the EMMA platform, the course was conducted by Priit Tammets and Lili Kesa. The course topic was inspired by the increasing popularity of digital gadgets and devices and their growing impact on our everyday life. Smartphones and tablet computers are the most popular devices people use nowadays for reading e-mails and staying in touch with friends, for example through social media. The aim of this MOOC was to go back to the roots and start looking at the basic set-up of these devices.
The five-week MOOC offered participants an opportunity to get to know their devices’ main configuration and settings, which people usually don’t pay attention to. For example the different security settings that can protect us and our devices from strangers in case of loss or theft were covered during the MOOC. Participants discussed what the pros and cons are regarding the sharing of location data and several participants explained how, thanks to enabled location services, they had retrieved a lost device.
To give some practical advice for daily use of the mobile device, different photo making and editing tips were shared. Questions like: how to take a nice photo with a simple smart phone? And: how to keep these photos (and other documents and data) backed up in cloud services? were discussed. To boost participants creativity a whole week was devoted to taking photos, editing them and sharing results on Instagram. To make it easy to find these photos people were encouraged to use the MOOC hashtag #mobilemooc, the results can be found here: https://instagram.com/explore/tags/mobilemooc/
The interesting questions and ideas shared by the “Mobile Devices in Everyday Life” MOOC participants proved that the topic is an important one and enabled to have engaging discussions and gave people the opportunity to be part of a great MOOC experience.