The Welten Institute, Research Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology of the Open University Netherlands held a welcomed around 60 students of the Master of Science program in Educational Science and other guests at Welten Conference on open education on 18 March.
The conference title, Opening Up Education, pointed to the many initiatives and projects conducted by researchers of the Welten Institute – from development of mobile inquiry learning to implementations of new educational formats as open online courses.
Prof. Dr. Marco Kalz opened the conference with a keynote on mayor current trends in open education and global initiatives as Open Educational Resources and MOOCs. The keynote was followed by a discussion on four themes – participation in open education and drop-out problems, scalability, self-regulated learning skills and MOOCs from the institutional perspective. In a series of workshops that followed, participants were offered introductions and hand-on experiences with learning analytics, MOOC design and platforms that support open learning.
Experiences from the EMMA project were presented by Dr. Francis Brouns and Dr. Olga Firssova during the workshop on MOOC design principles. More information and recordings of the sessions (in English) can be found at the conference site (in Dutch).