European universities must team up to survive

The educational landscape is being changed by growing focus on MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, but European institutes are missing out by insisting on offering their own courses instead of collaborating on one central platform warns Johannes Heinlein, director of strategic partnerships and collaborations at edX, a MOOC platform founded by US institutes Harvard and MIT.

Speaking at ESOF 2014, the largest science event in Europe, Mr Heinlein said: “European institutions and businesses at this point are not collaborating to the extent that will allow them to define the pathway of what the learning of the future will look like.

“Can education as a 1,000- year-old industry change? We think it can but there are some trends I see in Europe that quite frankly give me reason to be concerned. I feel that there is a great degree of fragmentation and learners are global citizens so this isn’t always the best thing.”

Partners

In Ireland, several third-level institutes offer their own MOOCs. The Dublin Institute of Technology has been running a pharmaceutical course since 2013 and

Trinity College

has just launched its first free online course in Irish history starting in September. Trinity’s course is also available on UK-based MOOC platform FutureLearn, which provides content from other partners including Queen’s University Belfast.

There is a role for common European policy in terms of accreditation said Ana Carla Pereira, head of unit in the directorate general for education and culture at the European Commission: "MOOCs have no geographical border. Ensuring that MOOC providers give students the recognition for completed courses is something we can examine at a European level as well as a national and institutional level."

Ms Pereira also touched on the idea of picking up credits across different courses – online or within universities – to earn personalised qualifications that could theoretically be chosen from modules across institutes within Europe.

"The university of the future will have two campuses: the physical one and the virtual one," added Patrick Aebischer, president of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Centralised platform

Prof Aebischer advocated the idea of a centralised European MOOC platform for reasons of control over content. Right now, he explained, European educational institutes are adding lots of content but the platforms are mostly owned by US-based companies which host the content and the data gathered on students.

Referring to the collaboration and centralisation of educational content in the US on platforms such as edX, Udacity and Coursera, Prof Aebischer said Europe was far behind the US, adding: “If we miss this boat, we’ll be in trouble.”

The talk also raised concerns of the user data gathered by these MOOC platforms, such as where the data is stored, for how long and what is being done with it. User data can feed into what is known as learning analytics to improve future online learning technologies, said Ms Pereira. She said that because Europe has strong regulation regarding data protection, it is important educators see the potential of MOOCs and do not block them due to fears of data abuse.