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A Vocational Open Online Course (VOOC) belongs to the wider category of online courses namely MOOC (Massive Open Online Course); a targeted online course aimed at participation on the web.
A VOOC is typically defined as a MOOC oriented to help younger students to choose their career path (Clark, 2014). The main difference between these two types of online courses being the more specialised and vocational nature of the VOOC, meaning that it is usually addressed to more targeted to audiences and learners such as professionals or students for training purposes and are therefore take into account VET teaching and learning particularities. For this reason, VOOCs are often more specialised and technical in their nature and provide targeted learning opportunities for particular occupational profiles while addressing occupational skills gaps. The content of a VOOC can be adjusted to professionals’ individual needs and training priorities, however their characteristics and functionalities remain common with a MOOC.
Vocational Open Online Courses (VOOCs) are based on vocational pedagogies, where practical tasks and procedures can be shown in real world examples along with experts as ‘talking heads’ providing advice. Unlike MOOCs as long-term academic courses, VOOCs are targeted, bite-size vocational courses that are free at point of delivery and typically take around an hour to complete (Clark, 2014). The first vocational MOOC or VOOC, Citizens' Maths, opened up learning in functional maths funded by a partnership of four UK organizations.
