Abstract
EduOpen is an Italian national network devoted to foster the MOOCs diffusion, not just another national provider, being mainly focused to intervene in some crucial fields such as: educational innovation, internationalization strategy, educational research on OER in order to build up some strategy of diffusion and also to make an effort of training those people involved into ICT supported education. It has been officially launched December 30th 2014 by seven universities, along with EDUNOVA (an Interuniversity Centre for supporting innovation technology in education, communication and research), by answering a project call of Miur (Italian Ministry of education). The founding universities are: the Polytechnic of Bari and the Universities of: Bari, Ferrara, Foggia, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Parma and Genova. The kick off took place April 20th 2015 and the official opening has been April 21th 2016 on the Miur premises; During this time, the network tuned various experiences of partners, defining and refining its own guidelines, according to both the literature and the Italian agency's recommendations (ANVUR). Nowadays, the number of universities increased up to sixteen and other ones are being negotiating their entrance.
Highlights
The distance education dates back many years, being much older than Internet, first leaning on postal services, and on telecommunications, as the schools in the vast territories of Australian farms; In Europe, just as an example, it is worth mentioning the distance learning at the “Fern Universität” of Hagen (Germany), which made use of postal communication between students and teachers just up a few decades ago
The rise of the Internet has enabled a turning point in communication, as in many other fields; anyway, it seems that the term MOOC has being coined just in 2008 for an open online course: "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" delivered by the University of Manitoba, Canada, see Downes [1]
All these initiatives were Open Educational Resources (OER), but still not MOOCs, as reported by Fini [4], all the materials were really free for use, but not organized within a course structure, and not usable for users without enough skills
Summary
The distance education dates back many years, being much older than Internet, first leaning on postal services, and on telecommunications, as the schools in the vast territories of Australian farms; In Europe, just as an example, it is worth mentioning the distance learning at the “Fern Universität” of Hagen (Germany), which made use of postal communication between students and teachers just up a few decades ago. The starting point could be identified in USA, where, in 2001, MIT launched a pioneer open course (OpenCourseWare) for publishing permanently their own materials on the open Web, followed by Open University of UK with OpenLearn project and Carnegie Mellon University with its Open Learning Initiative. Anyway, all these initiatives were OER, but still not MOOCs, as reported by Fini [4], all the materials were really free for use, but not organized within a course structure, and not usable for users without enough skills. A typical MOOC has no preliminary requirements, no fees, no formal accreditation and each one is attended on voluntary basis, depending only by the peculiar interest of people, an ubiquitous learning in which anyone can deal with his pace; in a few years MOOCs are grown up and are exploiting different topics and methods: from traditional video plus self-assessments and fora up to collaborative spaces, supported by the power and versatility of the new tools, according to two of the most important theories: that of the independent study of Wedemeyer and Moore [7,8] and the collaborative learning of Kaye [9]
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