elearning_label_higher_education
The European Commission welcomes the launch of the first pan-European university MOOCs initiative
Partners in 11 countries have joined forces to launch OpenupEd.eu, the first pan-European MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) initiative, with the support of the European Commission.
Around 40 courses, covering a wide variety of subjects, will be available free of charge and in 12 different languages in the portal www.OpenupEd.eu, officially launched on 25 April 2013. The initiative is led by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) and mostly involves open universities based in France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, UK, Russia, Turkey and Israel.
Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, launched the European MOOCs initiative in a webcasted international press event hosted by the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands. “This is an exciting development and I hope it will open up education to tens of thousands of students and trigger our schools and universities to adopt more innovative and flexible teaching methods”, she said. “We see this as a key part of the Opening up Education strategy which the Commission will launch this summer.”
Professor Fred Mulder, chair of the EADTU task force on open education and UNESCO chair in Open Educational Resources, is leading the initiative. "Our aim is to respond to the need for a more accessible system of higher education, which puts the learner at the centre. The European MOOCs will provide quality, self-study materials and a bridge between informal learning and formal education", he stressed.
For EADTU President, Will Swann, “the pan-European MOOCs initiative shows our collective passion to further innovate.”
The OpenupEd.eu free online courses range from mathematics to economics, e-skills to e-commerce, climate change to cultural heritage, corporate social responsibility to the modern Middle East, and language learning to writing fiction. Each partner is offering courses via its own learning platform and at least in its home language. Courses can be taken either in a scheduled period of time or anytime at the student's own pace.
All courses may lead to recognition: a completion certificate, a so-called badge, or a credit certificate that may count towards a degree. In the latter case, students have to pay for the certificate, with the cost ranging from € 25 to € 400.
TRAILER: Tagging, recognition and acknowledgment of informal learning experiences
This paper appears in the post-proceedings of The International Symposium on Computers in Education (SIIE 2012) in IEEE Xplore.
The evolution of new technology and its increasing use, have for some years been making the existence of informal learning more and more transparent, especially among young and older adults in both Higher Education and workplace contexts.
However, the nature of formal and non-formal, course-based, approaches to learning has made it hard to accommodate these informal processes satisfactorily, and although technology bring us near to the solution, it has not yet achieved.
TRAILER project aims to address this problem by developing a tool for the management of competences and skills acquired through informal learning experiences, both from the perspective of the user and the institution or company. This paper describes the research and development main lines of this project.
MOOC: Resultados reales
This article was originally published on the online journal Revista Educacion Virtual.
Las universidades tratan de ampliar sus fronteras en todo el mundo gracias a los MOOC. Sin embargo, aunque todo el mundo se está haciendo preguntas como ¿Cuáles son las ventajas y desventajas de los MOOC? ¿Como podemos hacer frente a las certificaciones? ¿Cómo podemos sacar un rendimiento monetario a este tipo de cursos?, etc. Lo más importante es conocer por qué surge este nuevo modelo de educación y cuáles son los resultados tras este tsunami inicial.
Call for interest - an OER for training teacher trainers
The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) invites expressions of interest for producing courseware in the form of an open educational resource for training teacher trainers in high quality open, distance and online learning. The target group for this call is an institution or consortium of actors/ institutions and the initial focus of the project is Africa.
Open, distance and online learning is rapidly expanding in universities and colleges in Africa and Asia, but faculty training has not caught up with the speed of development. According to the African Union Commission, the number of new teachers required in Africa by the year 2015 is estimated to be 3.6 million.
Online training using OERs will facilitate mass training of teacher trainers, which again will facilitate trained teachers in filling the huge gap in demand for educators in Africa. By using OERs, courseware can be adapted to different cultures and languages.
The OER/ courseware to receive an ICDE grant should focus on the needs of teacher trainers to deliver high quality faculty training in open and distance/ online learning. The first regional area of priority should be Africa. A regional focus on Asia will be considered when the project has delivered.
The expressions of interest must be submitted to the ICDE Secretariat, icde@icde.org by Friday 31 May 2013. ICDE will invite a smaller selection of applicants to deliver a bid in the form of a project proposal. One successful bidder will be invited to enter into a contract with ICDE. The value of the grant is USD 8,500.
ICERI2013 (6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation)
You are invited to participate in ICERI2013 (6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation). It will be held in Seville (Spain) on the 18th, 19th and 20th of November 2013.
It will be the best opportunity to present and share your experiences in the fields of Education, Research and Innovation in a multicultural and enriching atmosphere.
The attendance of 700 participants from more than 75 countries is expected.
There will be 3 presentation modalities: Oral, Poster or Virtual.
The deadline for abstracts submission is July 11th, 2013.
Abstracts should be submitted on-line at http://www.iceri2013.org/online_submission
For more information about the conference and its venue, you can visit our website www.iceri2013.org
The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice
Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University (UK), explores how new technologies are affecting the scholarly practice.
While industries such as music, newspapers, film and publishing have seen radical changes in their business models and practices as a direct result of new technologies, higher education has so far resisted the wholesale changes seen elsewhere. However, a gradual and fundamental shift in the practice of academics is taking place.
Every aspect of scholarly practice is seeing changes effected by the adoption and possibilities of new technologies. “The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice” explores these changes, their implications for higher education, the possibilities for new forms of scholarly practice and what lessons can be drawn from other sectors.
If we open it will they come? Towards a new OER Logic Model
The paper “If we open it will they come? Towards a new OER Logic Model” presents the result of a multilingual empirical survey on the ‘micro level factors’ of using, creating sharing and reusing open educational resources (OER).
Authored by Dr Ulf-Daniel Ehler, Professor for Educational Management and Lifelong Learning at Baden-Wurttemberg Cooperative State University, the paper emerges from the assumption that current models of OER integration are often lacking factors to support the creation of a sustainable open educational practice culture in organisations.
Micro level factors for integration of OER into teaching and learning on basis of the results of an empirical survey are presented and interpreted. They are used to enhance the OER logic model(s) into an “enhanced OER logic model” which, in addition to create equalized access, is capable of creating a culture of open educational practices as well.
wiki4HE research project
Wiki for Higher Education (wiki4HE) is a research project being carried out by Spanish researchers aiming to analyse the use of Internet open content for university teaching and explore and propose new ways for using these resources in learning processes.
wiki4HE will specifically examine the educational uses of one of the most important open repositories of knowledge nowadays, Wikipedia, and explore the attitudes and perceptions of university teachers towards this virtual collaborative encyclopaedia (and open resources in general).
The expected outcomes of the project are a clear understanding of the perception, attitudes and uses of Wikipedia by university faculty and the identification of factors influencing these perceptions and practices. Moreover, taking into account this information, wiki4HE will produce a catalogue of educational practices and tutorials involving the use of Wikipedia, which teachers and university staff will be able to adapt to suit their needs and their pedagogical orientations.
Finally a set of recommendations will be drafted in order to help any university teacher to design, plan and implement new teaching practices using open resources in the Internet.
Building an open social learning community around a DSpace repository on statistics
Learning Object Repositories (LORs) addressing content management and preservation have the positive collaterals of institutional positioning and dissemination, but their main benefit is the empowerment of interest-centred learning communities: the LOR provides the learner interaction with the LOs, but also with other learners and teachers.
“Building an open social learning community around a DSpace repository on statistics” was a conference delivered by Cesar Córcoles, Julià Minguillón and Brian Lamb at the 4th International Conference on Open Repositories, in Atlanta (USA) on May 2009. The text explains how the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has built a LOR combining DSpace with Delicious.
Analyzing hidden semantics in social bookmarking of open educational resources
Web 2.0 services such as social bookmarking allow users to manage and share the links they find interesting, adding their own tags for describing them. This is especially interesting in the field of open educational resources.
“Analyzing hidden semantics in social bookmarking of open educational resources” discusses the possibilities of using the crowd-sourcing phenomenon of social bookmarking for extracting semantics from the tags added by delicious users which describe links related to open educational resources (OER).
Author Julià Minguillón suggests the use of a simple statistical analysis tool to discover which tags create clusters that can be semantically interpreted. The obtained results are compared with a collection of resources related to OER in order to better understand the real needs of people searching for these.