European Journal of Higher Education IT – 2014-1

No one university can ignore the MOOC phenomenon. Although it is rapidly falling down along the Gartner Hype curve it will definitively influence the ways of teaching. But before jumping into the development of costly resources universities should define their objectives and thoroughly consider what does means going in this direction.

We will categorize the possible interests of a MOOC, for an institution, and then consider the needed resources, which must be, assemble before making the decision. A MOOC is a project for a full team, not for a single academic and this means coordination, human resources as well as a technical environment. A thorough investigation of all the requirements is mandatory before making any decision.

At year 2006, the strategic plan of the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia created an initiative, called Networked Teachingaimed to encourage the production of high quality e-learning materials as a companion material for the standard lectures.Since then, the combination of teachers, technical and pedagogical resources has produced more than 10,000 video learningobjects, from more than 1,400 teachers, 1,200 virtual labs, 3200 hours of recorded lectures, 120 OpenCourseWare sites and 41MOOCs, leaving the UPV brand as a top participant in the Spanish Speaking e-learning scene. A key factor in the UPV strategyis the combination of flexibility for the teachers, technical standardization and the requirement of pedagogical review, whichmakes the produced content reputable for the use both for individuals and for any Higher Education institution.

The article deals with developmental work of Sisu@UT tool (https://sisu.ut.ee) for creating learning modules developed on the basis of free open source OpenScholar software project. The tool enables the creation of interactive learning modulesthat support all the stages of the learning process and help students to achieve learning outcomes. Teachers of theUniversity of Tartu can experience web- based cooperation when using the tool. The main functionalities of OpenScholarsoftware and some integrated modules/plugins (quiz, webform and glossary module, multiple content editor and popupplugins) are introduced. Sisu@UT tool contains many other custom developments to the core of OpenScholar required to beused effectively in e-learning. These include the addition of metadata, site categories, developed custom themes andincluded Drupal’s Sweaver editor.

Sisu@UT (that has received very positive feedback from its users) is the only free open source software which enables to addand change interactive features online inside the same web site/learning module. It makes the management of learningmodules easier and less time consuming than other similar offline tools or online tools that do not enable to add interactiveelements.