Fostering quality in MOOCs: a european approach

Societal, educationaland personal changes have brought Open (Online) Education in the forefront of the global learning setting. One of the most significant challenges behind the EU Modernization Agenda is for education to respond to the characteristics of future students and to new needs in society. According to the Europe 2020 agenda, 40% of young people should complete higher education studies by 2020. The entire European university sector witnesses an increase of student numbers. Conventional learning methods are suboptimalsolutions for these massive student numbers. Thus, important questions and issues arise: How can we anticipate increasing student numbers combined with the likelihood of lower funding? How should we combine online and traditional formats to devise sustainable university business-models? In order to address these challenges Europe is investing in flexible educational solutions as this is embraced by the EC in its Open Educational Resource (OER) agenda. During the last years Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became very popular: Since the year 2008, when the first MOOC was provided, the number of MOOCs is constantly increasing. The year 2012 was considered as the "Year of the MOOCs". However, MOOCs and OER are a good solution as long as they retain a certain level of quality. So far, experience and practice are leading to an increasing debate about their quality as an educational tool. The high drop-out rates of MOOCs that are typically measured in traditional distance education courses as well as in all formal education settings are discussed causing requests for rebooting MOOCs and the research on them and their quality. This article addresses the open issue of integration of quality approaches and mechanisms into the design of MOOCs through the development of a European MOOC Quality Reference Framework (QRF). The MOOC QRF provides a generic, organisation-wide system to help Higher Education Institutions and external stakeholders to design, develop, monitor, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of MOOCs along with the quality management practices. Based on flexible, configurable quality criteria and indicative descriptors, monitoring and reporting is adapted to organisational needs. The article presents the structure and quality dimensions of the MOOC QRF.It is based on the first international quality standard ISO/IEC 40180 and currently submitted to the European and international standardization committee (CEN TC 353 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36) for approval as first quality standard for MOOCs. The MOOC QRF is practical to encompass a wide range of approaches to quality assurance emphasizing that it is the quality of the outcomes that matters most in the design of MOOCs, thus leading to a new era of learning experiences in Europe.This article is supported by MOOQ, the European Alliance for Quality of Massive Open Online Courses (www.MOOC-quality.eu). The vision of MOOQ is to foster and improve quality in MOOCs leading to a new era of learning experiences. MOOQ is partly funded bythe European Commission under the following project number: 2015-1-NL01-KA203-008950.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Fostering quality in MOOCs: a european approach

Societal, educationaland personal changes have brought Open (Online) Education in the forefront of the global learning setting. One of the most significant challenges behind the EU Modernization Agenda is for education to respond to the characteristics of future students and to new needs in society. According to the Europe 2020 agenda, 40% of young people should complete higher education studies by 2020. The entire European university sector witnesses an increase of student numbers. Conventional learning methods are suboptimalsolutions for these massive student numbers. Thus, important questions and issues arise: How can we anticipate increasing student numbers combined with the likelihood of lower funding? How should we combine online and traditional formats to devise sustainable university business-models? In order to address these challenges Europe is investing in flexible educational solutions as this is embraced by the EC in its Open Educational Resource (OER) agenda. During the last years Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became very popular: Since the year 2008, when the first MOOC was provided, the number of MOOCs is constantly increasing. The year 2012 was considered as the "Year of the MOOCs". However, MOOCs and OER are a good solution as long as they retain a certain level of quality. So far, experience and practice are leading to an increasing debate about their quality as an educational tool. The high drop-out rates of MOOCs that are typically measured in traditional distance education courses as well as in all formal education settings are discussed causing requests for rebooting MOOCs and the research on them and their quality. This article addresses the open issue of integration of quality approaches and mechanisms into the design of MOOCs through the development of a European MOOC Quality Reference Framework (QRF). The MOOC QRF provides a generic, organisation-wide system to help Higher Education Institutions and external stakeholders to design, develop, monitor, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of MOOCs along with the quality management practices. Based on flexible, configurable quality criteria and indicative descriptors, monitoring and reporting is adapted to organisational needs. The article presents the structure and quality dimensions of the MOOC QRF.It is based on the first international quality standard ISO/IEC 40180 and currently submitted to the European and international standardization committee (CEN TC 353 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36) for approval as first quality standard for MOOCs. The MOOC QRF is practical to encompass a wide range of approaches to quality assurance emphasizing that it is the quality of the outcomes that matters most in the design of MOOCs, thus leading to a new era of learning experiences in Europe.This article is supported by MOOQ, the European Alliance for Quality of Massive Open Online Courses (www.MOOC-quality.eu). The vision of MOOQ is to foster and improve quality in MOOCs leading to a new era of learning experiences. MOOQ is partly funded bythe European Commission under the following project number: 2015-1-NL01-KA203-008950.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Higher education provision using systems thinking approach – case studies

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the complexities involved in higher education provision and how systems thinking and socio-technical systems (STS) thinking approach can be used to understand the education ecosystem. Systems thinking perspective is provided using two case studies: the development of European Learner Mobility (EuroLM) service and the delivery of Enterprise System Management (ESM) course at the Birmingham City University, UK. The case studies present how systems thinking using STS approaches like applied organisational change and Cognitive Work Analysis can be used to capture a conceptual model of the education system for understanding the interactions and relationships between the people, technology, processes and the organisations. Using systems thinking perspective, EuroLM has developed a set of technical standards addressed to the European systems developers and ESM delivery ensures that students communicate and collaborate

A Model of Collaborating Agents for Content-Based Electronic Document Filtering

Abstract. The huge volume of distributed information that is nowadays available in electronic multimedia documents forces a lot of people to consume a significant percentage of their time looking for documents that contain information useful to them. The filtering of electronic documents seems hard to automate, partly because of document heterogeneity, but mainly because it is difficult to train computers to have an understanding of the contents of these documents and make decisions based on user-subjective criteria. In this paper, we suggest a model for the automation of content-based electronic document filtering, supporting multimedia documents in a wide variety of forms. The model is based on multi-agent technology and utilizes an adaptive knowledge base organized as a set of logical rules. Implementations of the model using the client-server architecture should be able to efficiently access documents distributed over an intranet or the Internet