The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) has published the report "Quality models in online and open education around the globe: State of the art and recommendations", a must read for any person concerned with quality in online, open and flexible higher education. More...

The European Commission’s initiative New Skills for New Jobs, highlights the importance of soft skills development to promote better anticipation of future skills needs and better match between skills and labour market needs. More...

The Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab (LINK),  from the University of Texas at Arlington, has published a review of the history and current state of distance, blended, and online learning. More...

This paper’s point of departure is a rough differentiation between what we term “Active Situated Learning” (ASL), and the complementary approach of “instructional learning”. More...

Issue 42 presents eight papers which discuss the process of eliciting and using design patterns in the design and delivery of open online education. Website: Design Patterns for Open Online Teaching and Learning.
The rapid rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has renewed interest in the broader spectrum of open online teaching and learning. This “renaissance” has highlighted the challenges and potential associated to the design of such educational environments.
The papers in this issue respond to a desire to understand the design processes and mechanisms by which we come to create and deliver open online learning at scale and by extension how we can formulate this into sharable design solutions that can be applied by others.
In the first paper (What do MOOCs contribute to the debate on learning design of online courses?), Hatzipanagos offers a review of the MOOC literature and asks what MOOCs contribute to discussion of learning design. He concludes by providing an example mapping of the identified learning characteristics with a number of MOOC design patterns.
In the second paper (Towards an open, collaborative repository for online learning system design patterns), Salvador and Scupelli highlight the importance for collaboration in the pattern production process. They describe a data driven pattern production methodology and a supporting open repository for patterns in the domain of online learning system design.
In the third paper (MOOCs as granular systems: design patterns to foster participant activity), Lackner et al. use a learning analytics perspective of participant activity in MOOCs to suggest three design patterns to combat high drop-out rates.
In the fourth paper (Designing MOOCs for professional learners: Tools and patterns to encourage self-regulated learning), Littlejohn and Milligan provide a view of MOOCs targeted at professional learners. They identify a gap around self-regulated learning and in response provide a set of five patterns to help support MOOC design for self-regulation.
In the fifth paper (Practical Patterns for Active and Collaborative MOOCs: Checkpoints, FishBowl and See Do Share), Mor and Warburton then describe the outputs of the Design Patterns Project that utilised the participatory pattern workshop methodology. They demonstrate the usefulness of this approach through three practical patterns for active and collaborative learning.
In the sixth paper (Patterns for Using Top-level MOOCs in a Regular University), Koppe examines the value of using an externally hosted MOOC for use in a flipped classroom setting. This paper uses three interlinked patterns to demonstrate how this can be achieved.
In their paper on peer interaction (Design patterns for promoting peer interaction in discussion forums in MOOCs), Liyanagunawardena et al. focus on discussion fora and draw from seven separate design narratives to present three patterns for facilitating meaningful discussion when the number of participants is large.
In the final paper (Making it Personal: Understanding the Online Learning Experience to Enable Design of an Inclusive, Integrated e-Learning Solution for Students) Dacko et al. take an alternative but complementary design approach and draw on a particular design methodology to show how it can be used the sphere of inclusive e-learning to create a cohesive and unified solution. More...

The ECO (Elearning Communication Open Data) project has just launched a new edition of the MOOC “Videos for teaching, learning and communication”, designed by the University of Manchester. More...

More than 3,000 students from 67 countries registered for the first MOOC offered by IFP School, the French graduate school for energy and transportation professions. More...

The Unesco Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) has released "The Role of Higher Education in Promoting Lifelong Learning”, a new publication reporting on how higher education institutes (HEIs) face a strategic imperative to broaden access to lifelong learning opportunities and ensure that education and learning are available to a diverse student population. More...

The third edition of the EU Code Week will take place 10-18 October across Europe, aiming to promote coding and to raise awareness of how it can help people to develop both technical and transferable skills for life. More...

Held on 15 and 16 of June as part of the training activities embraced by the Enhancing Quality of Technology-Enhanced Learning at Jordanian Universities (EQTeL), a project co-funded by the European Union, the project aims to improve the quality and relevance of technology-enhanced learning at Jordanian higher education institutions and to enable the country’s easier inclusion into European Higher Education Area. More...