This study focuses on developing and evaluating an online course aimed at preschool educators and primary school teachers. It presents a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on computational thinking, programming and robotics developed as part of the project “Laboratory for Technology and Programming and Robotics Learning in Primary and Preschool Education in Portugal (KML II)” The MOOC design was inspired by a blended learning model used in teacher professional development at the project’s inception and incorporates theoretical-pedagogical models of MOOC design as well as theoretical models of online interaction in virtual educational environments. The course will be offered on the NAU platform, a Portuguese MOOC platform. A pilot test was conducted with a purposive sample that included both participants from the target audience of the course as well as national and international experts specialised in these domains. The evaluation included a Likert scale questionnaire survey and open-ended questions. The results aim to validate the MOOC’s quality, including its structure, content relevance, proposed activities, and learning design. The findings provide evidence to improve the final version of the MOOC, contributing to its effectiveness and adequacy to the target audience.

In today’s postdigital society, the public presence of academics on the Web and the consequent affirmation of a given identity or of a multidimensional identity imply a much more complex and multifaceted management of their image than when we were dealing with a scholar whose identity was affirmed in circumscribed spaces and times. In this work, we seek to analyze the positioning of the subjects about their online identities and the ways in which they express the multiple facets of the construction of their online selves. We adopted a Thematic Analysis approach to qualitative research and used NVivo to analyze the data collected through semi-structured interviews of 13 subjects from a purposive sample of digital scholars. Three major themes were identified: Theme A—Digital-Presence Awareness; Theme B—The Public and the Private Spheres; and Theme C—Offline, Online, and Hybrid Selves. Overall, subjects clearly express the awareness of the need to build a presence on the Web. While there is a general concern to preserve a certain level of authenticity, intimacy, and privacy on the Web, there seems to be some heterogeneity in the experiencing of these processes. For some participants, the distinction between public and private and between personal and professional should be clearly marked, while for others, the necessarily hybrid nature of identity should be assumed, arguing that it is no longer possible to make a clear separation between the offline and the online world. This work, thus, shows different shades in the way academics construct their presence on the Web and how differently they assume several of the constitutive dimensions of their identities.

Equal access to health initiatives and services under the principles of universal and comprehensive care remains a challenge in Brazil. The realization of public health policies is further intricate when one examines the health situation of people deprived of liberty. This study showcases the “Prison System: Beyond the Walls” educational pathway, available on the Virtual Learning Environment of the Brazilian National Health System (AVASUS). The action research methodological strategy guided the pathway development, emphasizing dialogic learning. The goal was to address the need for massive training on the topic of prison health, with the model focusing on engagement through spontaneous, non-mandatory participation in the pathway courses. The pathway comprised four modules, whose educational offerings were based on the self-learning model. Students were free to choose which courses to take and in what order, as there was no prerequisite for participating in modules. Hence, students could either take all the courses or only those with which they identify their learning needs, regardless of work demands or personal interests. Structuring the pathway through action research facilitated a massive, cohesive, and continuous training process. This approach expanded knowledge and established meaningful relationships among the related topics and the key players involved: health professionals, prison officers, and people deprived of liberty. Notably, the pathway courses have surpassed the 50,000-enrollment mark, spanning all five regions of Brazil. In this context, this article presents and discusses the development of the “Prison System: Beyond the Walls” pathway, emphasizing the massive improvement of health within Brazil’s prison system and highlighting the results achieved.

Procuramos neste texto proceder a algumas reflexões sobre o papel das Tecnologias da Informação e da Comunicação no ensino e na aprendizagem focalizando a nossa atenção nas novas possibilidades tecnológicas suportadas pela web em contexto presenciais ou totalmente virtuais. Procuramos mostrar como se assiste hoje a uma grande vitalidade do pensamento pedagógico no contexto da Educação Online e exploramos em particular as temáticas da turma virtual e das comunidades virtuais de aprendizagem, o papel do professor online e os modelos de Educação Online.

This research aims to map the advances of the Open University of Brazil (UAB) in Sergipe in relation to the expansion and internalization of the graduation courses offered, in order to highlight the impact of the public policy promoted by the federal government that seeks to expand and internalize the courses offering and higher education programs, through e-learning. To do so, we performed quantitative research using basic statistics techniques to describe the percentage, mean and standard deviation. The results indicate that the innumerable obstacles to public policy and the lack of recognition of the profession are obstacles to the valuation of the teacher, issues that directly affect the demand of individuals for graduation courses in the country.