HybridEd Workshop: Innovations in Blended Learning with MOOCs

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés, Madrid, Spain, 24 May 2017

Workshop Theme

In the past few years, many universities all over the world have been producing Massive Open online Courses (MOOCs). In addition to the complexity and high cost of traditional MOOCs, it is still not clear how they can contribute to the mission of many universities. One of the ways to utilize the MOOC content and technology is to bring them back to the residential campus. In the past couple of years, many initiatives coupled MOOCs with Blended Learning (BL) practices to innovate traditional education (e.g. in [1] and [2]), and some universities started creating new hybrid models to leverage the MOOC popularity and reach (e.g Micromasters Program at MIT). Most practitioners are mainly familiar with the flipped classroom, but there is a great variety of BL models with a great potential, but unfortunately many are undocumented.

In a previous work, we made an effort to organize BL practices based on MOOCs in a framework called H-MOOC [3]. This framework describes BL (or Hybrid) initiatives in which existing MOOCs are reused to complement or extend traditional curricular practices. The framework classifies the initiatives as a continuum of two factors: (1) institutional support to reuse an existing MOOC, and (2) curricular content alignment between the MOOC and the program, or the course hybridized. The H-MOOC framework is a first effort towards providing a systematic analysis of what type of BL experiences have been developed, as well as a first step towards supporting their design [4]. However, the number of experiences of these type are still scarce, and more examples are needed in order to provide practitioners with guidelines and tools to support their design. Moreover, the hybridization of educational practices offers a new learning design space that still remains unexplored and where the H-MOOCs can play an important role in guiding practitioners in their way to become learning designers.

The goal of this workshop is to create a space and an outlet to share and present experiences in BL with MOOC experiences. The workshop will also allow attendees to reflect on these experiences, find common interests and explore future possibilities – through a group working session. In addition, we will provide a practical guideline based on the H-Framework for the attendees to discuss how it could be useful to organize, classify and describe their BL practices.

In summary, we aim for the workshop to be an attempt to document many of the Blended Learning experiences with MOOCs, and to start the process of studying them systematically. This workshop is part of the EMOOCs 2017 conference. You can see the schedule here.

Call for Papers

Please submit a 2 to 4 pages document in LNCS format reporting about experiences on using MOOCs for Blended Learning pedagogies in any domain (vocational training, lifelong learning, higher education or secondary education). The topics include but are not limited to:

  • Documenting Blended Learning experiments using MOOCs, highlighting lessons learned.
  • Describing new models for hybrid learning allowed by MOOCs or MOOC technology.
  • Research on Blended Learning pedagogy and methodology.
  • New and exciting tools for enabling Blended Learning with MOOCs.

The papers will be submitted via the EasyChair system.

Important Dates

  • Submissions: 7 April 2017
  • Notification of acceptance: 21 April 2017
  • Camera-ready versions: 12 May2017
  • Workshop: wednesdey 24 May 2017

Workshop schedule

Organizers

  • Saif Rayyan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
  • Mar Pérez Sanagustín, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
  • Carlos Delgado Kloos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
  • Jessica Sandland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Program Committee

  • Sheryl Barnes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Office of Digital Learning.
  • Carlos Delgado Kloos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
  • Lisa Eichel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • Mary Ellen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • Mar Pérez-Sanagustín, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
  • Saif Rayyan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • Georg Rieger, University of British Columbia.
  • Jessica Sandland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • Michelle Tomasik, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • Shelly Upton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.