As you may already know, the Excel 2010 and Search on the Internet MOOCS on EMMA are the first MOOCs being offered to our knowledge in three languages: Spanish, English and Italian. These MOOCs originally created in Spanish were first translated into English involving the translation of video subtitles and text content with the help of speech recognition and machine translation technology. This is the first natural step when you intend to provide your MOOC in multiple languages. English serves as a lingua franca in Europe and facilitates the translation of your MOOC into any other European language (Italian, in our case), as it is easy to find bilingual speakers in the desired target national language and English. This same approach is followed by the European Commission which generates the original version of any document in English and then translates it into the other 21 languages in Europe.
It was a challenge to fit in all that the team had prepared for the EMMA workshop at the EDEN Conference in Barcelona last week – but we managed to get through quite a lot during this 90 minute session. Deborah Arnold led the EMMA team managing this workshop which included Jessica Chao from UOC, Maka Eradze from UNINA and Sally Reynolds from ATiT. Deborah kicked of the workshop with a quick-fire overview of the steps and considerations people need to take when setting off on a MOOC adventure and managed to capture many of the key drivers and good practices worth considering. Participants then worked together in small groups to have a try at developing their own MOOC ideas which highlighted lots of issues and points for discussion. The slides shown are available here.
Europe must seize this moment to grab the opportunities offered by MOOCs
The HOME-EADTU report “Institutional MOOC strategies in Europe” published in February 2015 indicated that a majority of European institutions is planning to develop a MOOC soon. The report presents data on the perception and objectives of European higher education institutions on MOOCs and the main drivers behind the MOOC movement. In addition, the report makes a comparison with similar studies conducted in the United States in 2013 and 2014 and to data produced by the European University Association (EUA) between October and December 2013. The survey shows an increasing involvement in the MOOC movement by European institutions for higher education. But at the same time it is observed that the MOOC movement is (commercially) dominated by the United States through both the number of course offerings and leading service providers. The report can be found here.
Recording webinar: “Video in a multilingual context”
The recording of the Media & Learning webinar “Video in a multilingual context” which was held on 11 June, is now available here. This webinar highlights the use and application of high-quality automatic translation and transcription systems in MOOCs to provide access to the learning materials in multiple languages In the session two speakers from the EMMA partnership explore this topic: Jorge Civera from the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain, who is part of an expert team developing automatic educational transcription and translation systems and Ruth Kerr from the University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy who is experienced in delivering MOOCs using this system through the EMMA platform.
