I recently attended the eMOOCs European Stakeholders Summit in the beautiful Austrian city of Graz. The conference attracted participants from a wide range of European universities, MOOC platform providers, and other educational organisations, and participants from further afield including Chile, the USA, and Malaysia.
I presented my ideas on researching the influence of MOOCs on educators and other stakeholders in higher education in one of the first sessions of the conference. After that, I was able to enjoy interesting talks, workshops and panel sessions on a huge range of MOOC-related subjects – you can already find the conference proceedings online here. In fact, the proceedings were conveniently published before the conference itself.
A number of talks addressed issues of the impact of MOOCs on higher education – including work on MOOCs at the Technical University of Munich, and evaluation of teaching and learning in MOOCs by the experienced learning design team from the University of Delft in the Netherlands. Another interesting and valuable presentation addressed the tricky issue of ensuring quality of testing in MOOCs – this focused on ways to improve the use of multiple choice tests in MOOCs and provided some useful checklists for doing so.
The conference closed with an entertaining and interesting plea for collaboration and cooperation in MOOC accreditation from Pierre Dillenbourg of the University of Lausanne. The event provided great opportunities to develop such cooperative and collaborative initiatives – and we look forward to future improvement to all our endeavours in MOOCs.
