Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Maria Bustillos. Heading back to school with a seven-week MOOC. The future of higher education online is, at present, clear as mud. Do Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs — college-level classes offered online through a number of corporate providers — offer students better tools for study, increased opportunities at lower cost? Can they provide access to higher education to those who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it? Or do these canned classes portend the selling out of American education to Silicon Valley profiteers?
I took the best MOOC I could find over the last several weeks in order to try to answer these questions, as well as the one perhaps too seldom asked: Are even the best of these classes any good, or not? Are the best ones now, or could they one day be, as rewarding, informative and useful as a real class? Read more...

By Margarida Romero and Elena Barberà, Elearn Center, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Along with the amount of time spent learning (or time-on-task), the quality of learning time has a real influence on learning performance. Quality of time in online learning depends on students’ time availability and their willingness to devote quality cognitive time to learning activities. However, the quantity and quality of the time spent by adult e-learners on learning activities can be reduced by professional, family, and social commitments. Considering that the main time pattern followed by most adult e-learners is a professional one, it may be beneficial for online education programs to offer a certain degree of flexibility in instructional time that might allow adult learners to adjust their learning times to their professional constraints. However, using the time left over once professional and family requirements have been fulfilled could lead to a reduction in quality time for learning. This paper starts by introducing the concept of quality of learning time from an online student-centred perspective. The impact of students’ time-related variables (working hours, time-on-task engagement, time flexibility, time of day, day of week) is then analyzed according to individual and collaborative grades achieved during an online master’s degree program. The data show that both students’ time flexibility (r = .98) and especially their availability to learn in the morning are related to better grades in individual (r = .93) and collaborative activities (r = .46). Read more...

EdX will be available as an open source learning platform on June 1. In support of that move, Stanford will integrate features of its existing Class2Go open source online learning platform into the edX platform.
Stanford University will collaborate with edX, the nonprofit online learning enterprise founded by Harvard and MIT, to advance the development of edX's open source learning platform and continue to provide free and open online learning tools for institutions around the world.
By June 1, edX will release the source code for its entire online learning platform. In support of that move, Stanford will integrate features of its existing Class2Go open source online learning platform into the edX platform, use the integration as a platform for online coursework for on-campus and distance learners, and work collaboratively with edX and other institutions to further develop the open source platform. Read more...

Pierre AYER, consultant international sera à Nantes le 13 juin au salon des "quadras Quinquas"et prononcera une conférence à l'occasion de la sortie de son récent ouvrage "Vae Retro Curriculum Vitae?"
« Une carrière professionnelle est rarement linéaire, changement de poste, de fonction, d’entreprises, voire de nos jours de métiers.
Les points les plus sensibles se situent lors des ruptures majeures surtout lorsqu’elles se produisent sur le tard.
Le curriculum vitae est le support incontournable dans un processus de recrutement, encore faut-il rentrer dans ce processus qui n’est pas celui d’un examen, mais d’un concours, où il n’y a qu’un seul lauréat…! ».
Soyons réalistes, le CV n’est pas le support idéal pour rentrer dans la compétition, l’auteur dévoile dans cet ouvrage la démarche suivie par des cadres et des dirigeants qui se sont redéployés en s’inscrivant de manière enthousiaste dans une campagne innovante de « Promotion de leurs Talents » en utilisant une « FlashBiographie® ».
Dans cet ouvrage Jean Pierre AYER, président de High Potential Resources, apporte une vision, réaliste et dépouillée d’artifices du contexte actuel de l’emploi des cadres et dirigeants salariés, ainsi que des solutions leur permettant de rebondir rapidement lorsque cela devient nécessaire.
Les outils délivrés dans les chapitres, sont issus de son expérience de conseil auprès de nombreuses multinationales et de directeur à la CEGOS où il a accompagné la réussite de plusieurs dizaines de consultants.
Cet ouvrage est également émaillé d’exemples tirés du vécu des ressources de talents présentes chez HPR  qui ont su utiliser avec profit le dispositif de portage salarial de troisième génération, mis en place dans cette structure, pour vivre de manière pérenne leur poursuite d’activité.
Le lecteur trouvera donc ici, un guide pratique pour écrire sa biographie et mener une campagne de redéploiement efficace. Il pourra, en ligne, consolider son profil de personnalité à l’aide de l’autodiagnostic « DEFI Consultant® »  et s’approprier de nombreux outils pour développer des relations riches et fructueuses avec son entourage tant professionnel que personnel.

“Adults Learning for Intergenerational Creative Experiences” (ALICE) focuses this idea in a non-traditional way in order to:

-help adults, senior citizen and volunteers to reflect and acquire competences necessary to become effective educators, and the impact their actions can have on future learning of children.

-provide adults, senior citizen and volunteers with creative languages  to generate opportunities for intergenerational learning;

Dr. Fred Mulder, UNESCO Chair holder in Open Educational Resources (OER) at the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands and former Rector of OUNL, and Dr. Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chair holder in OER and professor at Athabasca University, recently stopped by Rome to deliver keynote addresses at the LINQ2013 conference.
eLearning Papers has recently launched an issue on MOOCs. What is your opinion about this phenomenon?
FMI think MOOCs are an interesting phenomenon that gained a lot of media attention recently. This attention can help make OER mainstream in education and get OER in the policies of governments. MOOCs are still in an infancy stage and they can further develop in various ways in the future, but I think they can anyway help reach this ultimate OER goal.
RM I am very excited about MOOCs. We were involved with the first MOOCs that came out in Canada and George Siemens, one of the founders of the MOOC concept, is one of our faculty members. I have been supporting scalable education nearly all of my professional life and I think the major challenge for the 21^st century is how we educate people around the world who are capable of a university education and just don’t have access, which is an issue not only in the developing world, but even in Canada and in Europe. We need to educate more people all their lives and we cannot do it using the elite model that we have developed in the past. Read more...

Interested in the challenges and future of MOOCs? We invite you to join this new online community and become an active actor on this ongoing and vibrant global discussion.
The recently launched MOOCs and Beyond community aims to analyse the role of these massive courses in the educational world and highlight and further explore the differences between the MOOCs learning experience and more traditional ones.
Is there a future for MOOCs in Europe? Will this historical movement in Open Education have a lasting resonance in the digital age? To what extent can MOOCs engage users socially? How well can they promote entrepreneurship education?
Discuss, share experiences and find out more about the possibilities of this challenging learning and teaching experience in the new eLearningEuropa.info free online community.
To join today “MOOCs and Beyond” just click here.

ICELW. 12 June 2013 - 14 June 2013.
ICELW works to improve online learning so that it makes a measurable difference in workplace performance and morale. Anyone with an interest or background in workplace eLearning is invited to attend and participate in the conference, which will take place in New York City from the 12-14 of June 2013.
The ICELW program cover a variety of topics relating to e-learning in the workplace and the use of technology to improve job performance, in the form of demonstrations, mini-seminars, case studies, interviews, debates, presentations, and panel discussions.