FROM E-LEARNING TO MOOC – THE AUKEE PROJECT CASE STUDY

This paper presents a summary of Leonardo da Vinci project called “GUI usability and accessibility: exchanging knowledge and experiences (AUKEE)”, which is realized in the cooperation between three European universities with an industrial partner.
In particular the objectives of this paper are threefold. First, the concepts of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and its growing popularity are presented. The introduction of MOOC is complemented by discussion of the differences between traditional e-learning course and MOOC. Second, the process of course development in the project is demonstrated by focusing on work organization and used course structure. Moreover, the challenges and problems met throughout the project in international and multilingual team are discussed. Third, the elaborated project results in form of various types of course materials, online platform are presented.

Introduction:
At present, the concept of Open Educational Resources is getting more and more popular. They are developed in different forms, such as Open Courseware repositories or Massive Open Online Course.
Especially MOOCs have recently received a great popularity. Their idea is to provide free access to course materials and resources and provide interactive user forums. Nowadays MOOCs are often launched in collaboration between dedicated organizations and prestigious universities.
MOOCs are usually supported by e-learning platforms. However, several interaction, assessment and communication aspects need to be considered preparing e-learning platform for MOOCs. Contrary to e-learning, where the course content is usually static, MOOCs are based on multimedia content, so it needs to be easily distributed. Massive nature of such courses entails to regard thousand users and hundreds of thousands of interactions. This distinguishes MOOCs from typical e-learning and it makes necessary to provide many features for administration and reporting of activity.

The project description:
The project “GUI usability and accessibility: exchanging knowledge and experiences (AUKEE)” was established in the frame of Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Learning Programme. The project started in September 2012 and it will last 2 years.

The course development:
The work within the project was organized by combining two kinds of organization. First, an organization by objectives and second, an organization by actors. The organization by objectives defines and schedules tasks according to objectives of the project, whereas the organization by actors allow us to schedule tasks according to skills and constraints of the 11 actors of the project.
In this section we first discuss the specific problems that were faced in the context of our particular project and then we address some general challenges with MOOC such as how was to precise and structure the course.

Results:
The main results of the AUKEE project are, of course, the complete MOOC courses on both usability and accessibility. The materials created for the project use the variety and richness of multimedia techniques, which allow authors to use different methods to present the discussed problem in a clear and easy-to-understand way.

All materials have to be placed on online platform to enable wide access for students. The Moodle platform was chosen at this point of project. The advantages and disadvantages of Moodle platform selection are presented.