By Honorary Reporter Madonna Youssef from Egypt

Photos = Madonna Youssef

As someone who is passionate about traditional Korean culture, I always search for courses to understand Korea in depth. In the process, I found a website that I consider like a treasure chest.

Korean Massive Online Open Course (KMOOC) is a platform established in 2015 by the Korean Ministry of Education to promote lifelong education for free online in collaboration with universities in Korea.

I wanted to try a course on Korean history and started with "New Understanding of Korean History through Life and Culture." The monthlong course started on Dec. 28 last year. I watched all the videos in order, took simple quizzes, submitted my homework, and wrote an essay for the midterm exam and one for the final. After a few days, I was sent a certification of completion for the course in English and Korean.

I received a certificate of completion for the course I took on the KMOOC platform. 

The lectures were interesting and easy to understand, and I also found handy features such as the progress bar, discussion board and option of listening to lectures offline.

The courses in KMOOC are categorized into sections that makes it easy to find a desired course. First is the departmental course section comprising humanities, social studies, education, engineering, natural sciences, medicine and pharmacy, arts, physical education and interdisciplinary courses. These are further divided into 36 sub-categories, and the section also has a linguistics course for those who wish to learn Korean.

These courses tend to be shorter in duration, with the longest being 13 weeks. Each lecture is just 15-20 minutes, so I spent 10 hours on an entire course.

A key criterion when choosing a course is language. Most KMOOC courses are in Korean with subtitles in Korean or English. Just four courses are available in other languages, so make sure to select a course in a language you are comfortable with.

Series courses, meanwhile, are longer and focused on family or society-related topics. On TV courses are available on the sites of Korean education TV stations such as EBS and JTBC. Finally, Match Up courses are on job competency for those looking to work in select sectors.

Even if you miss the enrollment period of a desired course, you can still audit it.

kalhong617@korea.kr

*This article is written by a Korea.net Honorary Reporter. Our group of Honorary Reporters are from all around the world, and they share with Korea.net their love and passion for all things Korean.