Mapping European MOOCs

EUA has published its second Occasional Paper on the topic of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Authored by Michael Gaebel, Director of the Higher Education Policy Unit at EUA, it also looks in detail at a number of issues related to the development of MOOCs that are directly relevant for universities. The full paper can be downloaded here.
Mapping European MOOCs
Concluding from reports on ongoing and planned initiatives from 13 countries at the first European MOOCs Stakeholder Summit, 06-07/06/2013, organised and hosted by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, there must have been at least 100 institutions offering (or planning to offer by the end of the year 2013) 200-250 courses; to this number, one would have to add 61 courses provided by the European open universities at the OpenupEd Portal. A forthcoming EUA survey on e-learning showed that of 249 responding European higher education institutions, 31 have MOOCs, but an additional 115 state that they consider introducing them. 75% of the institutions confirmed that they either had adopted a position towards MOOCs, or were planning to do so.
In September 2013, the recently launched Open Education Europa website of the European Commission comes to a similar number. But by end October, it already has 345 courses. The steep increase is probably due to a real increase in MOOCs (in particular through the launch of the French MOOCs platform France Université Numérique), but also to improved information gathering. Overall, the statistics suggest that while European universities took a longer time to get involved, they may now account for approximately one third of the MOOCs in the world. Download the full paper here.