EMOOCs 2014
COCo (Yannick Prié) was present at the EMOOCs 2014, the Second MOOC European Stakeholders Summit on Feb 10-12 at the Rolex Learning Center.
![Rolex Learning Center Rolex Learning Center, by Mikado1201 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons](wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Rolex_Learning_center_details_1-300x200.jpg)
Rolex Learning Center, by Mikado1201 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Four parallel sessions were dedicated to Research, Policy, Experience and Business. Conference proceedings are available here, and keynote videos are/will be here.
Some personal highlights include:
- the general energy and enthusiasm
- the importance both of learning analytics and the social dimension of learning
- the importance of the financial/economic question: business model have not stabilized yet
- the fact that questions related to OCW and OER surfaced regularly in the sessions, which was the occasion to remind people of the next OCW conference next April in Ljubljana
- the nice introductory keynote by Patrick Aebischer, the President of EPFL, who was the force driving EPFL to become the first University in MOOCs in Europe
- the OpenUpEd initiative, an European consortium of Open universities to promote OER-based MOOCs, both by aggregating MOOCs and being a quality label
- the positioning of FutureLearn, with a boss that come from media (BBC) and considers MOOCs as a new media, not far from having an entertainment view on education
- the open call from Iversity to welcome « small universities » that would not be accepted by Coursera or EdX
- the position of EU on the topic : they have acknowledged the coming massive disruption in higher education brought by the digital tsunami, and will support initiatives that try to create the new landscape. The call « Technology for better learning and teaching » will open in September
Next conferences will be in Belgium (Mons), organized by Louvain University in 2015, and in Austria (Graz in 2016).