This book reports on a rather unique European experience, the pioneering ECO project for Social MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and recapitulates the whole three-year process. It provides a critical perspective on the future of MOOCs in Europe and provides several comparisons with other existing models and platforms. The book contains chapters that address the major issues connected to MOOC design and implementation. The first 8 chapters cover large issues that extend beyond the ECO project experience, such as creative industries and trans-literacy; management and implementation; learning environments and platforms; dissemination; pedagogical models; interactivity and agility; gamification; evaluation; and business models. The last 3 chapters hone in on narrowly focused topics such as mobility, knowledge transfer and peer to peer evaluation. The specificities of this on-going project (funded by the EU) are: a unique collaborative pedagogy, an intercultural process (6 languages), and focus on intercreativity, the multiplying impact of e-teachers (the community of participants that was empowered to create more than 50 new MOOCs), accessibility and gamification. The book will be of interest due to its holistic approach to MOOCs and its assessment of their opportunities and their limitations. Many issues are explored and contribute to deeper understanding of the phenomenon and its transformative capacities for education and learning.

With e-learning technologies evolving and expanding at high rates, organizations and institutions around the world are integrating massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other open educational resources (OERs). MOOCs and Open Education in the Global South explores the initiatives that are leveraging these flexible systems to educate, train, and empower populations previously denied access to such opportunities. Featuring contributors leading efforts in rapidly changing nations and regions, this wide-ranging collection grapples with accreditation, credentialing, quality standards, innovative assessment, learner motivation and attrition, and numerous other issues. The provocative narratives curated in this volume demonstrate how MOOCs and OER can be effectively designed and implemented in vastly different ways in particular settings, as detailed by experts from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific/Oceania, and the Caribbean. This comprehensive text is an essential resource for policy makers, instructional designers, practitioners, administrators, and other MOOC and OER community stakeholders.

Language MOOCs (or LMOOCs) are dedicated Web-based online courses for second languages with unrestricted access and potentially unlimited participation. They are generating interest and expectation in the contexts of university education, lifelong learning and online training in general. This pioneering book presents an initial analysis of the theoretical and methodological issues underlying LMOOCs and presents empirical evidence of their potential for the development of language communicative competences, based upon previously unpublished research. It provides a mosaic-like view of LMOOC research, not only with respect to the geographical and institutional origin of its authors, but also to the heterogeneous nature of their respective academic backgrounds, and suggests directions for future development. As in other types of online language courses, the integration of the results of multidisciplinary research projects and teaching experiences related to LMOOCs is fundamental to make the field advance steadily and respond to some of the real challenges and problems faced by individuals working and living in competitive plurilingual societies today.

Disinformation Debunked: Building Resilience through Media and Information Literacy examines the way media and information literacy (MIL) can address disinformation in conjunction with fact-checkers and developers, to benefit from the expertise of these fields in fighting disinformation. The book highlights the underlying stakes that are involved in the fight against disinformation, from producing smart tools to generalizing their use beyond the journalistic profession. It considers the MIL theories and methodologies at work in the digital era, especially from the perspective of digital visual literacy. Offering a comparative study of four European national experiences (France, Romania, Spain, and Sweden), the authors also make public policy recommendations to improve the fight against disinformation. This book is of great importance to students, scholars, and educators working on media and information literacy, digital media, journalism, mass communication, misinformation and disinformation.

Universities across the globe are attempting to change assessment practices to address challenges in student engagement and achievement and to respond to a global employability agenda demanding evidence of a broader range of skills and competencies. In the UK this has acquired urgency given the shift of higher education over the last 20 years from the prerogative of an elite minority to mass participation in a highly diversified market system. Integral to this interrogation of objectives for assessment is the identified need to develop and improve academics’ assessment practice. Strategies frequently focus on attendance at formal Continuous Professional Development events and/or implementation of institutional blueprints. This book showcases how scholarship as part of academics’ practice can be part of an academic toolkit for change that expands awareness and knowledge of the purposes and effects of the pedagogy of assessment. The case studies – ranging from assessment in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), to assessment design for students whose first language is not English, to the effectiveness of peer learning to support academic integrity and programme-level assessment strategies – are framed by an introduction that explores a ‘communities of practice’ approach to the institution-wide improvement of assessment. It argues – through a case study from The Open University (OU) – that academics’ professional expertise is best deepened through participation in authentic activities of teaching and scholarship. The discussion identifies what is involved in such an approach including the role of an enabling principles-based framework, the constraints on implementation, and the implications for leaders of teaching and learning. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Open Learning journal.

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 17th IFIP WG 6.11 Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society, I3E 201, held in Kuwait City, Kuwait, in October/November 2018. The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. Topics of interest include, amongst others, the following: social media; information systems; marketing and communications; management and operations; public administration; economics, sociology, and psychology; e-finance, e-banking, and e-accounting; computer science and computer engineering; and teaching and learning.

This book offers the latest research and new perspectives on Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy. We are currently witnessing a significant transformation in education, and in order to face today’s real-world challenges, higher education has to find innovative ways to quickly respond to these new needs. Addressing these aspects was the chief aim of the 21st International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2018), which was held on Kos Island, Greece from September 25 to 28, 2018. Since being founded in 1998, the conference has been devoted to new approaches in learning, with a special focus on collaborative learning. Today the ICL conferences offer a forum for exchanging information on relevant trends and research results, as well as sharing practical experiences in learning and engineering pedagogy. This book includes papers in the fields of: * Collaborative Learning * Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) * Educational Virtual Environments * Engineering Pedagogy Education * Game based Learning * K-12 and Pre-College Programs * Mobile Learning Environments: Applications It will benefit a broad readership, including policymakers, educators, researchers in pedagogy and learning theory, school teachers, the learning industry, further education lecturers, etc.