The European MOOCs Stakeholder Summit 2016 conference took place at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz from February 22-24, 2016. It is a yearly conference that brings together experts in the development and research of MOOCs and their effectiveness. As CEL has a focus on online education, EMOOCs is an interesting gathering of companies, higher education institutions and policy makers from the European Commission. Henk Dekker, represented LDE-CEL together with a number of colleagues from the three universities and wrote this report.
- Andreia Inamorato dos Santos and Jonatan Castano of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre presented an interesting report about a survey on practices, beliefs and strategies regarding open education of higher education institutions in France, Germany, Poland, Spain and the UK. Open education is on the agenda of only half of the surveyed higher education institutions in these five countries. The offer of MOOCs is growing but still not widespread. Recognition of MOOC learning is rare. The main reasons not to engage in open education practices are that academic staff is not skilled to use open education and also the difficulties associated with formal recognition of open education. Lecturers get support to engage in open education but rarely in terms of career development.
- Eamon Costello and Mark Brown of the Irish National Institute for Digital Learning presented an important paper about the reliability and validity of multiple choice questions in MOOCs. Quite a few errors were found in the questions. Improvement is needed in order to prevent students wrongly denied a certificate or credits. I propose universities to decide that from now on all multiple choice questions in MOOCs must in advance be viewed by one or more test experts. All presentation slides can be found here.
- The LDE-CEL delegation included Janine Kiers (Delft University of Technology), Leonie Meijerink (Delft University of Technology), Kris Stabel (Erasmus University Rotterdam), and myself (LDE Center for Education and Learning). Janine Kiers presented in a convincing way a paper about Evaluating the Teaching and Learning in MOOCs. Her slides can be found here. Delft University of Technology has been widely praised for the performance in the field of developing, producing and offering MOOCs in both keynotes.
- Anant Agarwal – the CEO of edX and professor at MIT - gave the first keynote. He focused on the fact that heavy demands on MOOCs need to be made, if study credits are to be granted. EdX takes the necessary steps for what have been called 'MOOCs 2.0'. It was a great pleasure to hold a further discussion at dinner with him.
- Pierre Dillenbourg - the Director of the EPFL's Center for Digital Education - gave the second keynote. MOOCs of his university are a great success (participants, satisfaction, impact on university). He noted that there is a big difference between universities in involvement in developing and offering MOOCs. Not all university leaders are ‘MOOCified’. At the end of his speech, Pierre outlined three scenarios for the development of MOOCs in the near future. The individual approach by individual universities was good for a start but for the next step - upscaling - cooperation of universities is needed. Such cooperation may take the form of an alliance of universities running ahead and/or may take place in existing European associations such as EUA and LERU. In the time for questions, I mentioned that LDE-CEL (Leiden University, Delft University of Technology, Erasmus University Rotterdam) is an example of such an alliance, and that the experiences are very positive. I suggested to take the initiative for an alliance of MOOC intense universities following the conference and then to realize further cooperation in the EUA. The proposal was received well and participants from several universities want to join.
- Finally, Carlos Delgado Kloos - Vice Rector of Strategy and Digital Education - invited all participants to the EMOOCS 2017 conference 22-24 May 2017 at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Madrid.
Many thanks are due to the organizers: the Research Chair Marco Kalz (Open University Netherlands), the Experience Chair Anja Lorenz (University of Applied Sciences Lübeck), the Institutional & Corporate Chair Carlos Delgado Kloos (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid), the Flipped Mode MOOC Chair Mohammad Khalil (Graz University of Technology) and the Conference Chairs Michael Kopp (University of Graz) and Martin Ebner (Graz University of Technology).