Current trends of using MOOCs in European higher education: the European MOOC Stakeholder Summit 2015 review

Massive open online course (MOOC) is the most popular innovation in the sphere of online education that is actively studied and applied in universities all over the world. Starting from 2013 “PAU Education” company has been organizing a conference - summit devoted to MOOCs. This paper is a review of current trends in MOOCs discussed at the last European MOOCs Stakeholders summit held in 2015 at Universit Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. The review includes such issues as the geography of MOOCs scholars and practitioners, scientific collaborations, the best practices in online education and the highest priority directions of the research. The majority of studies have been performed by the faculties from Western and Southern Europe, including (in decreasing order) HEIs from the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands. Such countries as Austria, Switzerland, and Romania have been less active. The USA, Australia and Israel took part in the event as well. Some studies presented at the summit have been done in cooperation of several organizations. There is a Google map in the paper where we have added information about the participants and their collaborations. Analyzing the themes of the summit papers we came to the conclusion that MOOCs experts are interested in three aspects: pedagogy, methodology and technologies. A significant pedagogical problem is teacher- learner communication in a situation of a MOOC. Making a MOOC out of a traditional on-campus course and vice versa using existing MOOC in teaching university students are the major issues bothering methodology specialists and university administration. As for technologies, the current trends of visualization and gamification trigger questions about effective and financially reasonable usage of video and game elements in education courses. The highest priority research directions prove to be using learning analytics (in particular, for predicting the results of the course on the bases of the information about learners enrolled), new phenomena (like self-paced learning) and getting pedagogical advantage out of the opportunities that online education platforms provide. Tomsk State University producing its own MOOCs faces the same problems as the European education society. The experience that TSU gained in cooperation with three virtual online platforms allows it to present itself as a competent partner in this field. Institute of Distance education faculties try to strike the right balance between quality and quantity of these MOOCs and perform research aiming at finding solutions to this problem.

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