Emundus/Roadmap

The project is based on a twofold vision:

• The fast increase in the adoption of ICT-supported practices, both in the teaching side (OER and MOOCs) and in the mobility side (Virtual Mobility) of HE, do in fact challenge the HE internationalisation current paradigm and can radically change the approaches to mobility, transparency, quality assurance and effectiveness.
• Open Education (including MOOCs and Virtual Mobility) is not a solution to the urging challenges of reducing the unitary cost of higher education - moving towards a “market-oriented” global higher education system, but rather a way to help establish long-term international partnership, aiming for an open international setting where universities cooperate based on their capacity not only to attract international students but to meaningfully cooperate and share experiences with counterpart universities.

The aim of the eMUNDUS initiative is to explore the potential of ICT and Open Education (focussing especially on MOOCs and Virtual Mobility) to support long term, balanced, inter-cultural academic partnership.

We plan to reach this aim by working towards three objectives.

Objective 1: To map the state of the art of MOOCs and VM developments and to identify successful cooperation patterns

• Draft regional/national wiki-reports of open education, MOOCs and virtual mobility practices  
• Organise seven fact-finding seminars in UK, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, New Zealand, Russia and Canada.
• Produce a map of practices and challenges of open education, MOOCs and virtual mobility, pointing to some international HE cooperation patterns enhanced by MOOCs and VM.

Objective 2: To foster sharing of knowledge, tools, practices around MOOCs, VM and their impact on HE internationalisation

• Create an umbrella-repository for open education and virtual mobility tools, allowing comparison and adaptation in different settings.  
• Organise 6 Collaboration Webinars on the contribution of MOOCs and VM to issues like on employability, quality assurance, credit recognition, joint degrees.

Objective 3: To mainstream working practices of MOOCs and VMs as a way towards XXI century academic cooperation

• Organise a final international conference in Brussels
• Elaborate recommendations sets, for universities, academic networks and policy makers
• Produce a Final summative project publication