Digital Universities in the MOOC Era: Redesigning Higher
Education
The
digitalisation of higher education, as a consequence of technological
development, has long been confined to providing more efficient management
systems. Only recently has the digital culture made a major inroad into
academic life, with the diffusion of MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, as the
new e-learning format to deliver top quality content for free to millions of
students worldwide. While HE Institutions are broadening access to their
academic offer to online users worldwide, the corporate and NGO sectors are
exploring the benefits of a more qualified online approach to training and
dissemination for both personnel and clients, as well as the general public.
The
unbundling of the different processes involved in education delivery,
especially credentialing, with the emergence of new actors on the educational
market leads us to question what the future holds for traditional HE. What are
the new social demands? How do educational institutions intend to cope with
these fast-changing audiences and targets? Are corporate MOOCs a fierce
competitor to HE institutions or a worthy ally?
The
answers lie in the intersection among digital culture and educational
environments. Bringing together people from government, academia and media, the
ICEM International conference 2017 intends to focus on the emerging of MOOCs as
a disruptive innovation in the traditional academic eco-system.
We are
looking for high profile speakers and contributors to shed light on specific
aspects of these four strands:
Digital culture and educational environments
The
advent of MOOCs has opened up new, and previously unthinkable, scenarios in
higher education. Millions of learners are now aware of this extraordinary
offer, and platforms are mushrooming all over in the world. As MOOCs become
part of the established institutional offer, HE institutions have to work out
how these new distance learning models fit with traditional institutional
curricular design and development, teaching, credentialing and research
practices. What is the strategic response to funding constraints and the need
for flexible provision? Are MOOCs destined to become a new form of shadow
education? How is the MOOC phenomenon going to be institutionalized?
Space vs. Interface design
A key
aspect is the relationship between MOOC formats and instructional design. One
might expect MOOCs to play the same disruptive role that books and printing
literacy played in XV century learning. However, books had a well-established
format and interface that MOOCs do not have yet. How to create an interface
culture for the digital education? How much do learning space and format
influence education? How can the user experience be improved both in the
classroom and the digital world?
Platformism – new paradigms in online learning
Today,
two giant operating systems – Microsoft MsDos and Apple Os – dominate the
computer world, with two ancillary developments – Android and iOS – controlling
the mobile environment. In the Higher Education environment there is still open
competition among traditional e-learning software solutions and those offered
by the main MOOC providers. How is platformism influencing learning
environments, and what operational conditions are necessary for learners to
exercise their choices? Moreover, should we expect a new oligopoly to emerge,
concentrating the best of higher education in a few giant hubs with their
proprietary formats and platforms?
Going visual: video language and pedagogy
Finally,
it seems that video is here to stay. Talking heads, interactive videos, virtual
labs augmented reality; all kinds of magic can be reproduced through our
screens. How do we expect the traditional student-teacher relationship to be
reshaped with the new opportunities web-videos are offering to provide top
quality educational resources in a distance-learning environment? What is the
role of quality and aesthetics and personalisation? How do we accommodate the
changing relationships between teacher and student in the online environment?
The conference is organised by ICEM and Federica WebLearning Center (federica.eu). Details for abstract submission and deadline here: www.icem2017.eu