Once announced by the European Commission in 2013, open education is still a hotly debated topic on the Europe's educational agenda and has been taken up within the renewed priorities of ET 2020 New priorities for European cooperation in education and training as it deems the key to building knowledge-based society through providing an open access to HEI services for all. The project seeks to support the Europe's Opening up education policy through leveraging Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) potentials and tackling challenges faced by MOOCs developers and learners. A MOOC is an online course with the option of free and open registration, a publicly-shared curriculum, and open-ended outcomes. MOOCs build on the engagement of learners who can self-organize their learning according to learning goals and prior knowledge and skills but also on the pedagogical skills of teachers who are empowered to design and implement engaging online teaching and learning MOOCs scenarios that can support self-directed and personalized learning. The fact is that neither learners no teachers are adequately prepared resp. supported to participate in and benefit from the open educational services. As a result, only a small fraction of learners (5%) successfully complete MOOCs they registered for. Based on the above needs, the objectives of the MODE IT project are: 1. to boost HEI educators' awareness and skills for MOOCs design and delivery; 2. to develop and implement innovative MOOCs-based instructional approaches for curricum design into HEI practices; 3. to raise awareness of learners for and improve their learning experiences through MOOCs. To achieve the above objectives, the following outputs will be designed, tested, and implemented during the project lifetime: IO1: online self-assessment tool for identification needs of HEI educators on MOOCs design and delivery. This tool will allow teachers to identify current status of their pedagogigal skills related to the MOOCs design and delivery, to detect areas for skills improvements, and to get suggestions for boosting competences. In this manner, the responsibility of teachers for their own professional development will be fostered, too. At least, 50 teachers from participating HEI will test the tool and evaluate its usefulness. IO2: open online training program for HEI educators on MOOCs design and implementation. This program aims at empowering HEI educators to design and implement innovative MOOCs-based teaching/learning strategies and integrate them into curricula. This program will be designed itself as MOOC promising a few benefits to wider international teachers community such as flexibility, open access, and direct immersion into MOOCs approaches through learning via MOOC. The training program will be closely linked to the self-assessment tool: based on the assessment results, teachers will be recommended either to take advantage of separate module(s), which will cover the missing skills, or to complete the whole MOOC. In this manner, targeted training will be facilitated. IO3: Redesigned MOOCs-based HEI curricula & stand-alone MOOCs: the innovative techniques on redesigning curricula through integrating MOOCs into study programs will be piloted at 5 participating HEIs. Teachers that tested and completed the developed training program (IO2) will demonstrate the acquired skills through aligning their traditional teaching and learning strategies with the MOOC approach: teachers will design new teaching and learning scenarios for the open online environments considering student-centered approach, virtual collaboration, and supporting teacher activities.The piloting phase of the redesigned curricula/courses will target: - formal students at participating HEIs (75 students): In this manner, they can benefit from flexible innovative learning formats, increase their digital skills, and boost their self-directed learning competence. - non-formal learners (professionals, adults - 125 learners). Doing so, HEI services will be opened to wider audience. Through the interplay of these 2 strategies, a greater impact towards promoting open learning, social inclusion, and increasing access to HEI for all wil be promoted. The MODE IT project has greater potentials to contribute to bridging the gap between HE and labour market through 1) promoting digital skills and self-directed learning of formal and non-formal learners highly needed at any workplace, 2) boosting the data bank of MOOCs within participating countries that can be used for free for professional growth within continuing education of teachers or work-based learning (this would be especially relevant for EU countries with high unemployment rates), 3) designing innovative cooperation models between HEI and non-academic sector towards developing MOOCs-based training formats for employees.
Based on the above elaborated needs, the objectives of the project were as follows: 1. To boost HEI educators' awareness and skills for MOOCs design and delivery: MOOC-based pedagogies were considered a powerful tool towards modernizing HEI curricula. Thus, the project aimed at improving pedagogical and digital skills of HEI teachers and trainers as they were essential to integrate innovative open online educational practices into HEI teaching and to achieve therefore better learning outcomes of students. 2. To develop innovative MOOCs-based instructional approaches for curriculum design: the partnership was looking for new ways of opening of formal curricula through designing and embedding MOOCs, and their establishing within HEI practices. 3. To improve students' learning experience through MOOCs: the project aimed to enhance HEI students’ responsibility for their own learning, competence and professional development, as well as to increase their awareness of professional development and lifelong learning opportunities.
The project addressed the needs of HEIs educators as well as those of the labour market. Due to merging job profiles and exponential growth of knowledge, requirements to the employees (who are mostly HEI graduates) were becoming complex forcing them to constantly improve their qualifications. Even if a plenty of open online learning provisions was available to support lifelong learning (such as MOOCs and their variations), a global completion rate of MOOCs is about 5-15% (Jordan, 2013). According to many researchers (Kop, 2011), the reasons for drop-outs were missing skills of graduates related to self-directed learning (ability to take responsibility for their own learning), digital competence, and general readiness for lifelong learning, which were highly important to successfully operate in today’s knowledge-based society. It was evident that those competences were not subject of HEI formal programs, which were still delivered following behavioristic, instruction-based principles. HEI educators still showed lack of skills of modern digital pedagogy that could foster active learning of students through collaborative learning scenarios, social learning, or individual learning pathways.