Perspective Chapter: Implementation of MOOCs for Microcredentials and European University Alliances

MOOCs are seen as an important measure to open up universities to new target groups. In this chapter, two new variants of the usage of MOOCs in European higher education are highlighted: First, openly licensed MOOCs can be used as part of microcredential offers with university accreditation. Second, openly licensed MOOCs can be made available to other universities as an integrated resource and offer within European University alliances. This chapter discusses legal (such as copyright issues), organizational (such as processes), and technical issues (such as LTI, eduGAIN) for these new developments. An important requirement for this is that MOOCs are available as open educational resources (OER): Open licenses that allow the reuse, modification, and republication of educational resources (“open education resources”) are another opportunity to open up and share university offers. This chapter is based on experiences of the national Austrian MOOC platform iMooX.at, the microcredential implementation of Graz University of Technology, as well as first ideas concerning the integration of openly licensed MOOCs within the unite! University alliance of nine European technical universities.