The first EMMA summer school was organised from 4-11 July on on the Mediterranean island of Ischia in Italy alongside the 11th JTEL Summer School, a well-established annual format on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Participants were teachers and academics interested in the MOOC phenomenon and even potential new providers for EMMA. The agenda for the week was set by keynote speaker, professor Larry Cooperman, Associate Dean of E-Learning at University of California Irvine, he encouraged the group to focus on pedagogy and learning within MOOCs: “MOOCs offer important opportunities for learning but learning is a social activity. We need to build intimate environments for learning at scale, enabling learners to understand and construct knowledge in small groups, even though total participants are in their thousands”.
The EMMA programme provided a framework for the design, production and delivery of MOOCs. It introduced participants to theoretical frameworks for pedagogy and learning in the massive environment. The importance of careful planning at each stage was explored through a MOOC work-flow before participants were introduced to the EMMA platform. Sessions on data tracking and translation introduced two of the major added value features on EMMA.
The EMMA coordinator recapped the lessons learned from the first round of MOOCs delivered on EMMA and provided instructions and data for using MOOCs to get out of the fish bowl of traditional teaching and into the creative environment of blended learning. The Summer School participants rounded off the week with a presentation of the MOOC concept they had prepared for EMMA during the week. They will be ready for launch during the second year of EMMA.
Find presentations of sessions at the Summer School here.
You can read more Summer School insights from EMMA partners and participants at the event on Facebook, Twitter and Storify.
The EMMA Summer school was run in cooperation with: EATEL & Federica Weblearning.