For students in University of Pennsylvania Open Learning courses, the online education provided in the global classroom doesn’t end when the courses do.

“Growing Old Around the Globe” from Penn’s School of Nursing is a shining example of the college-level continuing education that can be found in Penn’s free massive open online courses.

Students enrolled in the MOOC, first offered in 2013, created a community of learners around the world who are still sharing perspectives on aging and learning about gerontology via the course teaching team’s social media outreach.

Archived video lessons are available for public viewing on YouTube.

The teaching team and former students converse about aging issues and retweet posts related to these issues via the course Twitter account, @OldGlobeMOOC. 

The “Old Globe” community Facebook page gives members of the public who weren’t students in the course the opportunity to share ideas, pictures and news on aging with former students and the teaching team led by Sarah Kagan, the Lucy Walker Honorary Term Professor of Gerontological Nursing at Penn, and Anne Shoemaker, an educator in Penn Nursing’s Helen Fuld Pavilion for Innovative Learning and Simulation.

Last summer, Moira Allen, co-founder of Pass It On Network, a program promoting positive aging, posted a message on the “Old Globe” Facebook page asking how long the video lectures would remain accessible to the public. “I can't tell you how many people all over the world I have encouraged to look at the video lectures. I loved them all.”

Course lectures as well as videos created by students can be viewed on YouTube.

“These videos represent a view that shows us that life in an aging society is about everyday life and real relationships -- something Anne and I tried mightily to emphasize in ‘Growing Old Around the Globe,’” Kagan says. “We'd like people to see, as this and other ‘Old Globe’ participants did, that life in an aging society is about many generations, varied relationships and vision for an age- and elder-friendly world.”

There’s a set of video perspectives uploaded by a class participant in England, Nanda Seetharam. She interviewed elderly neighbors and others to get their perspectives on some questions posed in the “Old Globe” course.

Among those interviewed are June, a retired doctor, whose husband, doctor and World War II veteran who has early stage dementia; Joe and Rosemary, a couple on a mission to be happy, active and helpful to their neighbors; and Osheen, a young adult sharing her views on aging.

Course video lectures feature aging experts interviewed from institutions outside Penn. In one video, Kagan and Shoemaker talk with colleagues from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Ages program and its Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation.

“We are very happy to see that our courses have such a broad impact and that the Penn Open Learning platform can showcase the tremendous depth and breath of our faculty like Professor Kagan and her team,” says Deirdre Woods, interim executive director of Penn’s Open Learning Initiative.

In the final webcast video, Kagan and Shoemaker interview the co-founder of Aging 2.0, a global network of innovators in the field of aging.

Kagan views the Open Learning large-scale education platform as “an excellent venue to interpret how individuals, families, communities and societies navigate in an aging world.”