Overview of papers on enhancement of European Higher Education as presented during the Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Rome, October 2016.

MOOCs and Open Online Courses in general offer new pedagogical opportunities to support student-centred learning. Since 2012/13 the focus on the learning process has increased and today the result is a number of interesting approaches with abbreviations such as: BOOC - Blending Online and On-Campus Course, DOCC - Distributed Open Collaborative Course, HOOC - Hybrid Open Online Course, SMOC - Synchronous Massive Online Course and SPOC – Small Private Online Course, among others. All are examples of innovative ways to support personalised learning adapted to the local/national educational framework. Parallel to these developments, there is also an increasing interest within Higher Education to focus on short stand-alone courses and resource-based learning. This might support flexibility in educational programmes, but at the same time challenges the reflective dimension of degree programmes. In this paper, we discuss the pedagogical framework for integrating MOOCS and Open Online Courses in Higher Education in order to explore opportunities and to avoid threats. Furthermore, we discuss how learning units (integration of Open Educational Resources with learning activities) may support the reflective dimension in higher education offering open online courses.

Keywords

higher education · independent learners · innovative teaching and learning · Lifelong Learning · Open Educational Resources · open online courses · skilled learners · student-centred learning