Topical Collection "Massive Open Online Courses"

Welcome to contribute with your latest research on MOOCs

I am the Collection Editor 

Dr. Ebba Ossiannilsson

The Swedish Association for Distance Education
Interests: choiced based learning; e-learning; hybrid learning; learning analytics; learning design; MOOCs; OER; online open learning; quality; rhizome learning

Topical Collection Information

Dear Colleagues,

All global organizations, such as UNESCO, Commonwealth of Learning, the European Union, and others around the globe, call for opening up education in all means to:

…turn international policy statements into actions to ensure equity, access, and quality which encourages countries to provide inclusive, equitable, quality education and life-long learning opportunities for all. In particular, this is to respond to the scale and urgency of need for higher education in the period 2015 to 2030 due to the expected massive growth of students.

Global actions aim to encourage, facilitate, and embrace the power of online, open and flexible Higher Education for the future we want for a sustainable global development, and to allow education for all, at anytime, from anywhere, by any person, at any time and on any device. Thus, we have to concentrate, what is on the horizon related to the entire concept of opening up education. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) provides offers and resources as never before. New business models are seen, not just branding and common goods, but also, for example, MOOCs are used both for lifelong learning and degrees, but also as continuing professional development (CPD), and not least of all, to meet the enormous higher education updates for refugees. MOOCs have also highlighted pedagogical questions for open online learning, as we can not educate today’s students with methods from the past century, for a future we do not know anything about. There are huge needs for innovations and entrepreneurship to meet demands in the global society today, and tomorrow. Opening up education requires also that we go beyond MOOCs and OERs (Open Educational Resources) and also to find new opportunities for learning, especially for personal learning, just for me and just in time learning.

We very much welcome your contribution of your research and/or policy statements.

The journal is an open access journal, so we are welcoming articles continuously.

We will especially address some burning themes:
•    open online learning beyond MOOCs
•    innovation in global open online learning
•    new pedagogy and learning engagement
•    the death of the MOOCs, or maybe the new born MOOCs
•    MOOCs and inequality
•    Can MOOCs address the need to “skill” the population around the globe?
•    the next generation of learners, teachers, managers, administrators
•    opening up learning to ensure equity, access, and quality
•    credentialization and recognition of MOOC-based learning
•    stakeholders for MOOCs
•    business models for MOOCs
•    learners success stories
•    If MOOCs are the answers, what are the questions?

Ebba Ossiannilsson
Collection Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the collection website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 350 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions. 

Keywords

• choice based learning
• equity, access and quality
• globalization
• lifelong and lifewide learning
• new learning environments
• open online learning
• recognition
• MOOC

e4qualityinnovationandlearning: Education in a Digital Age

e4qualityinnovationandlearning: Education in a Digital Age: Professor  Erik P.M. Vermeulen  raise in his blog post  Aug 13 2017 t he urgent question as many international researchers, including myse...

Education in a Digital Age

Professor Erik P.M. Vermeulen raise in his blog post Aug 13 2017 the urgent question as many international researchers, including myself has raised during the last couple of years: How to Prepare the Next Generation for the Uncertain Things to Come about how to prepare the next generation for an uncertain  future.

He as many others emphasize that The future will be full of tremendous opportunities, but it will also be a world of tremendous uncertainty. Such uncertainty creates a huge challenge for educators. With the current pace of innovation and shorter innovation cycles, it seems obvious that new technologies are going to continue to transform every aspect of how we live and work. Constant technological disruption is the new normal. “Old world” concepts, models, paradigms and ideas will no longer be relevant. The fig as below illustrates the evolution form around 1980 until 2025, which is also predicted by te UNESCO SDG 2030

Accordingly we have to raise the urgent questions on why, what, whom, when, and how, as we have to reconsider what should we be teaching our students today? and also that Education needs to become much more “forward-looking” and skills-based.

The most urgent question according to Vermeulen is about: How then do we prepare the next generation for dealing with unknown future problems? He gives some answers as the five #, which are aligned with the UNESCO SDG Goals and also 21st century skills

#1 — Creative Thinking

#2 — Entrepreneurship

#3 — Teamwork

#4 — Ethics

#5 - Interdisciplinary learning

So the second important question, besides what is according to Vermeulen about; How should we teach the next generation? and What teaching methods do we need to employ to be more effective as educators in the digital world?

The  largest risk for universities is that if they don’t adapt to this new reality, they will go the way of the “dinosaurs”. Lumbering giants ill-suited to a different and fast-changing environment.

Read the full post here