#EMOOCs2017 - Lessons learned (by Alexandra Pana)

 It was a challenge for me to do it!

So, I decided to leave my job for 5 days (it wasn’t easy to obtain this!) and to try to participate in the Volunteer’s EMOOCS2017 Program. I needed the 4 transversal ECTS but also I needed to learn something new and to interact with new people.

Following all my needs, I participated as a volunteer at the 5th European MOOCS Stakeholder's Summit, held in Madrid, at UC3M from 22 to 26 May 2017…..and it was a great experience!

In the start, I knew nothing about MOOCS. I am the typical/classical student in Law, addicted to manuals and traditional teaching classes, so I never thought that it might be possible for me to study and graduate an on-line Law course, but this experience in EMOOCS2017 changed my way of seeing things.

This Summit gathered specialists in pedagogy, informatics and public policies from all over the world and their main objective was to find the perfect match between people’s educations needs, technical possibilities and teaching methods in order to rise up the level of education in the world and to facilitate the access to information for all the social categories. It isn’t easy to find the best solution for this, especially when you work with "living" concepts, that evolve from a day to another. But in these 5 days I saw a lot of struggle and a positive approach from all the participants. This brand new domain (the first MOOCs were born in 2011!) promises a lot of potential for young and talented teachers but also for the big players in the digital market/world (Coursera, Edx, SAP, Microsoft, Google, MiriadaX etc.). This is the field where business and social interests meet harmoniously. Maybe for this reason the Summit was a perfect fruitful brainstorming place.

I chose (helped by EvaJ) a workshop that met all my expectations: how to deal with the cultural diversity in MOOCS? And I discovered two wonderful and dedicated ladies: Rosanna de Rosa and Ruth Kerr. These two ladies, teachers of the University of Naples Frederico II, are coordinating the EMMA Project which is a European Multiple MOOC Aggregator, launched in April 14, 2014.

The project, led by 12 universities and companies in 8 European countries, provides access to MOOCs in different languages using automatic transcription. EMMA is a 30-month pilot project supported by the European Union. Its goal is to allow learners to access MOOCs in different languages with the help of automatic transcription. The pilot offers a total of 16 MOOCs, aiming to involve over 60 000 participants.  The website aggregates and hosts courses provided by European universities who wish to provide their courses in multiple languages. Secondly, the platform allows users to create their own learning paths by bringing together various units from different MOOCs. 

 

The importance of this workshops wasn’t just to discover this new possibility to study in different languages, but also to find out that a lot of people are using volunteer their time and energy to find solutions in order to preserve the cultural diversity of Europe, pushing, in the same time, the students to interact one with each other, to exchange ideas and to mix traditions. At the end of the workshop we reached the idea to create en Erasmus Exchange Platform as a transposition of the classical and successful ERASMUS Program in the new Digital Education World. Maybe someday, someone will write down this project and implement it!

As a conclusion, participating in this Volunteer’s EMOOCS2017 Program was the best choice I made this spring! I found new possibilities for my future carrier as a Law teacher, I met wonderful people, I learned brand new things, I escaped work and I had a lot of fun….

So, I am looking forward for the next volunteering program (I also need 2 more ECTS!), I got enrolled in a MOOC and I hope to meet again the volunteers team and the coordinators.

Best regards from Romania!

Alexandra Pana