In the last months, many people around the world have been forced to work from home. The “stay at home” phenomenon has given people the opportunity to organise their time between work and leisure in a way they could not do before, because of their day-to-day pace of activities. For many, this period at home has also become an opportunity for educating themselves.

As a result of the isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, new channels have emerged to assist the educational experience. One of the best known is the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) platform, known in Spanish as CEMA.

Let’s have a look at its main features:

• Massive: without any restrictions on enrollment.
• Open: the content is free and there are no eligibility requirements for access.
• Online: access is via the internet.
• Course: the aim is to teach by providing content and testing students.

The origin of the MOOC online platforms

MOOC was created in around 2007, but it was in 2011 when Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig of Stanford University promoted an open artificial intelligence course in which 160,000 people from all over the world enrolled. This marked a turning point in online training.

The great potential of these courses is that students can access an endless amount of content from anywhere, anytime. Many of the courses are offered by prestigious universities around the world, such as Yale, INSEAD, Columbia, Oxford, Harvard, IESE, etc. The most common methods of access are through online educational platforms.

Online training platforms offer a solution to the need that modern society has for continuous training, with the flexibility that enables it to adapt to other activities or personal situations. This would not be possible with traditional training methods.

As Henry Ford said: “Anyone who stops learning becomes old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young; that is the greatest thing in life.”

BBVA in Switzerland is committed to the professional development of its employees. As well as the MOOC platform, it offers Campus BBVA, BBVA Group’s corporate university, which provides access to a huge amount of resources and topics (languages, coaching, taxation, finance, etc.) via any device.

We collaborate with our employees on their continuous learning, so that we can compete in the digital society and offer the best service to our clients.