=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2356/experience_short17
|storemode=property
|title=MOOC and OERs in a Virtual Mobility Experience
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2356/experience_short17.pdf
|volume=Vol-2356
|authors=Antonella Poce,Maria Rosaria Re,Francesca Amenduni,Mara Valente
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/emoocs/PoceRAV19
}}
==MOOC and OERs in a Virtual Mobility Experience==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2356/experience_short17.pdf
Proceedings of EMOOCs 2019:
Work in Progress Papers of the Research, Experience and Business Tracks
MOOC and OERs in a Virtual Mobility experience
Antonella Poce1, Maria Rosaria Re2, Francesca Amenduni3 and Mara Valente4
1 University of Roma Tre, Department of Education, Via del Castro Pretorio 20, 00185, Rome,
ITALY
antonella.poce@uniroma3.it
2 University of Foggia, in collaboration with University of Roma Tre, Department of
Education, Via del Castro Pretorio 20, 00185, Rome, ITALY
mariarosaria.re@uniroma3.it
3 University of Foggia, in collaboration with University of Roma Tre, Department of
Education, Via del Castro Pretorio 20, 00185, Rome, ITALY
francesca.amenduni@uniroma3.it
4 University of Roma Tre, Department of Education, Via del Castro Pretorio 20, 00185, Rome,
mar.valente19@stud.uniroma3.it
Abstract. Abstract. The present paper is part of the Erasmus + project
“OpenVM: Opening Education for Developing, Assessing and Recognising
Virtual Mobility Skills in Higher Education”. The aim of this paper is to share
good practices related to the implementation of Virtual Mobility (VM) that
partners have been developing throughout the project. There will be presented
guidelines for designing and choosing OERs for our VM MOOC and which
design principles we have been following for the MOOC design and delivery.
The guidelines are inspired by previous experiences of VM and literature analysis
and they can be useful to design future VM experiences. In addition, the structure
and the evaluation of the pre-pilot mini MOOC named “media and digital
learning” is presented in detail.
Keywords: Open Virtual Mobility; OERs; MOOCs.
1 Introduction
Virtual mobility (VM) stands for ICT supported activities, organized at an institutional
level, that realise or facilitate international, collaborative experiences in a teaching
and/or learning context (Erasmus + program guide). VM activities allow students
enrolled in a higher educational institute to access to education elsewhere, supported
by curricular, legal and institutional frameworks of participating universities of other
higher educational institutes. VM participants can receive instructional support,
assessment and gain formal credits from the “virtually” visited institution. This form of
student mobility requires the adoption of the Learning Agreement, an instrument, that
stipulates the rights and duties of the students and the Higher Education institution
(Ubachs & Henderikx, 2018). Since online learning has been growing in recent years,
VM can answer to many pedagogical needs, especially for less advantaged students.
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Work in Progress Papers of the Research, Experience and Business Tracks
VM has a great potential to contribute to the internationalisation and opening up of
Higher Education by creating international, collaborative experiences for educators and
students as well as equal possibilities of participation in exchange programs, including
those who are unable to travel for social, financial or other reasons. VM emphasises
cross-border collaboration with people from different backgrounds and cultures
working and studying together. It aims also at the enhancement of participants’
intercultural understanding and ICT ensure to obtain the same benefits as one would
have with physical mobility but without the need to travel. Despite the numerous
projects and initiatives promoting VM in the last years, the uptake of the concept in
Higher Education is still low and poorly known and, as a consequence, HEIs, educators,
and students need more effective ways of achievement and recognition of VM skills
necessary to successfully engage in VM experience.
The present paper is part of the Erasmus + project “OpenVM: Opening Education for
Developing, Assessing and Recognising Virtual Mobility Skills in Higher Education”.
The project aims at promoting VM of educators and students in Higher Education, in
line with Bologna and Open Education principles (van Mourik Broekman, Hall,
Byfield, Hides, & Worthington, 2015) by developing and disseminating tools for an
online, open and flexible learning, assessment, and recognition of VM skills using Open
Credentials. The project is expected to achieve 7 intellectual outputs related to different
aspects of the Open Virtual Mobility ideation and implementation. Although all the
outputs are strongly inter-related, the present paper will focus on the activities related
to Output 6 named "OER, MOOC, and Pilots". This output is aimed at designing VM
OERs and the VM MOOC and ensuring the project sustainability through a piloting
phase. The MOOC will provide different kinds of learning experiences, including
gamification (Output 5) and collaborative learning activities, supported by the use of
the Matching tool, an algorithmic solution to build learning groups (Output 3). The
OpenVM MOOC contents are based on the skills necessary to be engaged in Virtual
Mobility (identified in Output 1). Participants' knowledge and skills will be assessed
through different kinds of e-assessment tools (Output 4) and learning achievements will
be recognized through badges (Output 5). The MOOC is integrated into a Virtual
Mobility Learning HUB (Output 2) that provides a Personal Learning Environment.
2 General background on OpenVM MOOCs and OERs
The aim of the Open VM MOOC is to help educators and students developing a defined
set of VM skills and applying them to Virtual Mobility programs, actions and activities
in various academic disciplines (Yuan & Powell, 2013). Like any successful course,
the MOOC requires careful planning and continuous revision (Daradoumis, Bassi,
Xhafa, & Caballé, 2013). This is the reason why it was necessary to define strategies to
provide an Open VM experience. The MOOC Canvas (Alario-Hoyos, Pérez-
Sanagustín, Delgado-Kloos, 2013) was adopted to support the design, and to promote
discussions between the different stakeholders involved in the creation of a MOOC.
The resources (equipment, platform, human and intellectual) were defined before the
beginning of the project whilst part of the design decisions (especially in terms of
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objective and competences, learning contents and assessment activities) have been
negotiated in progress among the output leader and the partners.
In line with the features proposed by Bates (2015), the OpenVM MOOC was
conceived in line with the xMOOC definition, since we decided to include the following
features:
1. a large number of participants, facilities for the storing and streaming on demand of
digital materials, automated assessment procedures and student performance tracking;
2. computer-marked assignments after which students receive immediate computerised
feedback. These tests are used both for formative assessment and to provide a badge
after the MOOC successful fulfillment. Most assignments are based on multiple-choice
and computer-marked questions. In addition, peer-assessment tasks were adopted for
competences’ assessment. Students were randomly assigned to small groups in order
to peer assess e-portfolios contents;
3. supporting materials, such as slides, supplementary audio files, URLs to other
resources, online articles and video lectures can be downloaded by participants and they
will have Creative CC License;
4. moderation is directed to all the participants rather than to individuals. Participants
are expected to moderate each other’s comments or questions;
5. badges or certificates are used to recognize the successful completion of a course,
based on a final computer-marked assessment.
Eight areas have been identified (Output 1) as main contents for the OpenVM MOOC:
1. Intercultural Skills; 2. Collaborative learning; 3. Autonomy-driven learning; 4.
Networked Learning; 5. Media and digital literacy; 6. Active self-regulated learning; 7.
Open mindedness; 8. Virtual Mobility Knowledge. For each area, a miniMOOC was
created. Three levels are then proposed for each area: beginner, intermediate, and
advanced. Each combination of content and level has been called SubMOOC. Thus, the
OpenVM MOOC was composed by eight miniMOOC and 24 subMOOCs. A Sub-
MOOC is a section of the Open VM MOOC and it has the following characteristics:
1. it refers only to levels of complexity (beginner, intermediate, and advanced);
2. it refers only to one of the areas identified;
3. it contains 1 or 2 videos and two textual documents (blog pages, pdfs, presentations);
the intermediate and advanced SubMOOCs also have scientific literature references;
4. once the participant completed a SubMOOC, an Open Badge will be issued;
5. it lasts one week;
6. it contains at least 1 formative assessment quiz composed by closed items (MCQ,
FIB, T/F, Matching) with included feedback and at least 1 summative assessment quiz
composed by MCQ items with included feedback;
7. the advanced SubMOOCs have a peer assessment based on the Tune Models of
Peer Assessment described by Piech and others (2013).
All the miniMOOC will contain approximately 9 Open Educational Resources (3
for the basic level, 3 for the intermediate level and 3 for the advanced level) . An OER
is a “digitised material freely and openly offered for educators, students, and self-
learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research” (OECD, 2017). In the
OpenVM MOOC, OERs are considered the study material that participants could read,
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Work in Progress Papers of the Research, Experience and Business Tracks
listen, download and re-use for their personal purposes. OERs include slides,
supplementary audio files, URLs to other resources, online articles and video lectures.
Three main macro-indicators have been identified for the OERs Evaluation (Poce,
Agrusti & Re 2015), to assess OER to be included in the Open VM MOOC: 1 Quality
2. Appropriateness and 3. Technical aspects. After creating an OERs assessment greed
based on the three main macro-indicators, the project partners were required to provide
OERs in different formats and languages, based on the skills content defined in the
Intellectual Output 1.
Roma Tre team organized the work as following:
1. each partner has to find at least 9 OERs related to one of the skills defined in
the IO1. The skill assignment was based on partners’ scientific expertise.
Partners had to download the OERs in Google Sheets;
2. the OERs selected are peer-assessed by another partner of the project. Peer-
assessors could add comments and feedback and propose alternative OERs.
In this way, partners have the opportunity to compare their opinions about
OERs that could be included in the VM MOOC.
3. In the last phase, partners work in small groups of two or three people. They
are invited to organize the OERs selected and assessed in a miniMOOC,
following a provided structure.
The process was conceived to guarantee that each partner contributes to the selection
and assessment of the OERs and eventually to the OpenVM MOOC design. Following
this process, the partners contribute to the realization of the first mini-MOOC on
“Media and Digital Literacy” that will be described in details in the next paragraph.
3 The OpenVM pre-pilot: Media and Digital Literacy
The first miniMOOC (Figure 1) has been realised to be tested during the pre-pilot
phase and it is focused on “Media and Digital Literacy”. The main topics of the course
are open education, open resources and licenses, the web mechanisms that affect
learning processes, and media languages (multimediality, hypertextuality). The
pedagogical approaches used to design the pre-pilot phase are collaborative and social
learning (Andriessen, Baker, & Suthers, 2013); reflective practices (Schön, 2017), and
self-regulated learning (Zimmerman, 2013). For each level, students need to read texts,
e-books or pdf, watch videos and participate in discussions forums. When they
complete all the tasks, they fill in summative quizzes, write a post on their e-portfolios,
make and receive peer-assessment in order to obtain the badges.
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Figure 1 Home page of the course on Media and Digital Literacy
The MOOC has a small narrative, by differentiating personal stories according to the
user’s profile: teacher and student. The introductory MOOC includes the narrative
(scenario, problem-based) and the pre-assessment quiz. According to the score obtained
in the pre-assessment quiz, students are invited to enroll in the basic, intermediate or
advanced level. The pilot phase lasted approximately 2 weeks: 10 days to complete all
the tasks and 4 days to complete the e-portfolio and the peer-assessment.
At the end of the course, students were invited to fill in an online questionnaire aimed
at investigating (1) participants’ general evaluation, (2) participants’ specific
evaluation, (3) participants’ recommendations for improvement and (4) hours spent to
complete the course. Qualitative data from 9 participants have been collected until now.
The participants enjoyed the selected contents, especially in form of videos (see the
Extract 1). The basic level MOOC was the most endorsed.
E1 “The MOOC was a useful introduction to Media Literacy. The videos on TEDx are
fascinating. The instructions were easy to follow. All in all I liked the course because it
is a new way of learning and a new topic.”
Although participants appreciated the opportunity to test their skills through e-
assessments and e-portfolios, they also suggested to improve the e-portfolio
functionality. Participants would need clearer instructions regarding how to fill in the
e-portfolios, providing for instance a template.
4 Conclusion
Virtual Mobility represents a great opportunity to contribute to the students and
educators internationalisation. ICTs can guarantee the same benefits of physical
mobility without the need to travel. Thus, it is necessary for the technologies employed
to be carefully planned and continuously revised. This paper provides useful guidelines
to design a Virtual Mobility experience based on the use of MOOCs and OERs. The
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Proceedings of EMOOCs 2019:
Work in Progress Papers of the Research, Experience and Business Tracks
guidelines are inspired by previous experiences of Virtual Mobility and literature
analysis, and they were used to design the OpenVM MOOC in the Erasmus + project
“OpenVM: Opening Education for Developing, Assessing and Recognising Virtual
Mobility Skills in Higher Education”. A description of the pre-pilot MOOC on Media
and Digital Skills is presented to give a concrete basis for educators and practitioners
to design their own Virtual Mobility courses, by following the principles of self-
regulated learning.
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