Website: 99 Best Online College Resources on Open Courseware and MOOCs. eLearning Papers, a digital publication created as part of the European Commission’s elearningeuropa.info portal, has been included among the 99 Best Online College Resources on Open Courseware and MOOCs by the Top 5 Online Colleges blog.
Published five times a year, the online magazine highlights the latest trends on e-learning in Europe and stimulates research. eLearning Papers provides all those interested with an opportunity to have their texts published. Through these articles, the journal promotes the use of ICT for lifelong learning in Europe.
eLearning Papers has been listed among the best General Open Learning online resources, a selection of sites which provide access to open education resources, including lecture transcripts and recordings, textbooks, class syllabi, assignment rubrics, and educational material in any format that can be transmitted electronically.
Click here to access the eLearning Papers archive. “MOOCs and Beyond”, its latest issue, focuses on the challenges and future of Massive Open Online Courses.

Blackboard, a global leader in online teaching solutions, has announced the release of a flexible option for running Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The platform will be available soon to all Blackboard clients at no extra cost in a non-exclusive, non-binding manner.
With more institutions looking to offer large, open courses, the new option annouced by Blackboard aims to provide a fully functional, flexible platform option complete with social learning capabilities and a wide range of course management and student engagement features.
"Institutions need more flexible options for experimenting with MOOCs and running online courses that meet their individual needs," said Katie Blot, president of education services at Blackboard.
Dozens of institutions have already partnered with Blackboard to run MOOCs on a service called CourseSites. The new platform will be enhanced with features to let colleges make some connections between their on-campus courses and their free open courses.

Author: Katerina Zourou. This paper, originally published on the blog on Open Education 2030 of the Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, claims that multilingual, user driven and glocalised components will be catalysts in shaping future Open Education.
Open education, as a societal demand that overcomes barriers to learning and development of personal and professional skills, is a reality, together with similar-minded initiatives such as open access to knowledge and more recently MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) aimed at large-scale participation via the web regardless of the learner’s location, status, age or origin. Read more...

Authors: Li Yuan, Stephen Powell, Hongliang Ma. Designing Learning for the 21st Century (DL21C) is an online course developed by collaboration between a UK and Chinese University to explore new approaches for open learning courses, and the key attributes of Massive Open Online Courses.
A primary motivation for this project included the exploration of business models, this is essential if long-term viability of new approaches and courses are to be assured. From a pedagogical design perspective, the motivation was to create interactive, responsive and pedagogically effective on-line and blended learning, freely available as an open educational resource (OER).  A particular challenge was how to make the course developed culturally, linguistically and pedagogically useful in different languages, cultural contexts and educational settings.  
The rapid expansion of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has sparked great interests about their potential to disrupt the higher education system and the provision of open online courses as strategic choices for the future in institutions. The course developed by the team fulfills the criteria of a MOOC in that it was online and free to access, although in practice the only students registered with the Chinese university participated and were awarded credit.

Par Daniel Laurent. Tandis que la nouvelle loi sur l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche (ESR) prévoit de "faire entrer l’université dans l’ère du numérique", l’enseignement supérieur connaît depuis quelques années une révolution dont les universités françaises n’ont pas encore pris la mesure : les MOOCs. Cet acronyme désigne les "massive open online courses" ou cours en ligne ouverts et massifs, c’est-à-dire une formation ouverte et à distance ayant recours au télé-enseignement.
Cette révolution est née il y a quelques années aux Etats-Unis, dans l’université de Stanford (Californie) quand un cours sur l’intelligence artificielle, dispensé habituellement à une centaine d’étudiants, reçoit un succès inattendu : une fois ce cours proposé en ligne, sur les 100 000 personnes qui s’y sont inscrites, 23 000 d’entre elles le valident. Suite de l'article...

By Brian Gabriel. The massive open online course (MOOC) platform edX announced on its blogthat it is releasing its entire learning platform as open source, enabling universities and independent developers to contribute to its online platform. The venture began May 2, 2012 as a partnership between Harvard and MIT, and in March 2013 reached its 1 millionth student enrollment. The edX platform is implemented in Python, Ruby and NodeJS. Developers can access edX’s source code at http://code.edx.org/. Read more...

By Jonathan Rees. Widespread online-only higher ed will be disastrous for students—and most professors. The word mooc sounds a bit like slang from Goodfellas or the affectionate shortening of the already-affectionate name of a former outfielder for the New York Mets. In fact, a MOOC is a new kind of college-like experience that seems to possess the magical power to turn some of the smartest people in academia into followers of a faith-based cult because they want to become its idols. Read more...

By Ki Mae Heussner. The 21-year-old is pursuing a dual-degree program in engineering and biophysics from Dartmouth and Amherst, but in the last year or so, he’s also completed 36 massive open online courses (MOOCs) on Coursera, Udacity and edX. Right now, he said, he’s taking 10 courses simultaneously — while he completes a summer internship at Google. When his friends go out for Thursday night parties, he said he often stays back to complete Coursera assignments due the next day. And, once, he spent 80 hours on a single assignment. But he said the MOOCs have helped him pass out of lower-level classes in college and even prepped him for his Google interviews. Read more...

1000 copies à corriger en moins d’une semaine. C’est une charge de travail fréquente quand on organise un MOOC. Comment évaluer des milliers de participants sans embaucher une armée d’examinateurs ? Passer uniquement par des quizz ou autres évaluations automatiques ? Certes on peut faire beaucoup de choses avec, mais vient un moment où la machine a ses limites. Les organisateurs de MOOC ont donc dû trouver une astuce : l’évaluation par les pairs. Retour sur l’un des procédés d’évaluation au cœur de l’essor des MOOC. Suite...