‘Making sense of the MOOCs’ - report from ACA-EUA Seminar in Brussels (10 October)

Around 150 participants, including representatives from higher education institutions and associations, public authorities, quality assurance agencies and the media, gathered last week for the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA)-EUA Seminar “Making Sense of the MOOCs”. The event was designed to enable participants to discuss and find out more about the development and potential impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have been developing rapidly and are creating much discussion and debate in Europe and further afield. Speakers at the event included representatives from HE institutions in Europe and the US, MOOC platforms and representatives from ACA and EUA.
While the initial development of MOOCs was largely concentrated in the US, there has recently been a sharp increase in the number of European HE institutions offering them. According to the European MOOC scorecard on the EC’s Open Education Europa website there were more than 250 MOOCs across Europe at the end of August.
Some institutions in Europe have preferred to offer courses through platforms/activities initiated in the US such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. Others have joined the growing number of initiatives launched in Europe (such as FutureLearn and Iversity), some of which have received public funding or government support (such as France Université Numérique), or have launched their own MOOCs. In April, with the support of the European Commission, the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities also launched OpenupEd, described as the first pan-European MOOC initiative. More...