Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have continued to attract considerable media coverage as governments and universities respond to the open and online education movement. Three years after the MOOCs began its rise, it is clear that the HE institutions in the EU are gaining speed in this movement. This report on MOOCs intends to contribute to literature on MOOCs in Europe. Its specific aim is to present data on the perception and objectives of European higher education institutions on MOOCs and the main drivers behind the MOOC movement. In addition, the report makes a comparison with similar studies conducted in the United States in 2013 and 2014 and to data produced by the European University Association (EUA) between October and December 2013. The report made clear that involvement is still increasing, but also that arguments to get involved differ from those in the US. The main source is a survey conducted by the project HOME - Higher education Online: MOOCs the European way, partly funded by the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme. The survey was conducted in October - December 2014. In total 67 institutions responded out of 22 European countries representing in total about 2.8 millions of students.
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02/01/2015Even though classroom discussion is considered an essential element of citizenship education, research indicates that pre-vocational students have fewer opportunities to practice with these discussions than their pre-academic peers. To provide more insight into pre-vocational teaching strategies to facilitate citizenship-related classroom discussions that allow for variation in familiarity with discussion, we analyzed observations of plenary discussion moments during 26 lessons at three Dutch secondary schools. Classrooms less familiar with discussion seem to benefit from a focus on structural aspects of discussion and avoiding strict content regulation, whereas classrooms more familiar with discussion profit from reflection on both process and content.
This paper reports on CATS (2006-2007), a project initiated by the Research Centre Teaching in Multicultural Schools, that addresses language related dropout problems of both native and non-native speakers of Dutch in higher education. The projects main objective is to develop a model for the redesign of the curriculum so as to optimize the development of academic and professional language skills. Key pedagogic strategies are the raising of awareness of personal proficiency levels through diagnostic testing, definition of linguistic demands of curriculum tasks, empowerment of student autonomy and peer feedback procedures. More specifically, this paper deals with two key areas of the project. First, it describes the design and development of web-based corpus software tools, aimed at the enhancement of the autonomy of students academic reading and writing skills. Secondly, it describes the design of three pilots, in which the process of a content and language integrated approach - facilitated by the developed web tools - was applied, and these pilots respective evaluations. The paper concludes with a reflection on the project development and the experiences with the pilot implementations.
