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
-- Eleonora Pantò Learning, Inclusion and Social Innovation Programme Developer ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- CSP – Innovazione nelle ICT s.c. a r.l. Strada del Lionetto n. 6 – 10146 Torino Italy C/o Politecnico di Torino/BRC C.so Castelfidardo, 30a – 10129 – Torino Italy ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tel. +39 011 4815139 Fax +39 011 4815001 cell. +39 3486086090 e-mail eleonora.panto@csp.it ATTENZIONE: ABBIAMO CAMBIATO SEDE This message and its attachments are privileged and confidential and exclusively destined to the addressee. In case you receive this message by mistake or you are not the addressee, please inform me immediately and destroy the message.