The COVID-19 pandemic started off a process that would drastically change the ways to teach and learn, deepening and accelerating the relationship between technologies and educational processes, reshaping the Higher Education scenario. The emergency challenged Universidad de la República, the main public university in Uruguay, which in turn…

As social justice and decolonisation discussions fill the physical and virtual corridors of universities in South Africa, educators, and in this case, MOOC designers, are inevitably influenced by them. They are prompted to reflect on such topics, whether in agreement or with scepticism. Provoked by one interviewee's comment that 'you could…

This paper outlines an innovative approach to evaluating the emotional content of three online courses using the affective computing approach of prosody detection on two different text-to-speech (TTS) voices in conjunction with human raters judging the emotional content of the text. This work intends to establish the potential variation on the…

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become an accepted way to make learning opportunities available at large scale and with low cost to the learner. However, only if these are made accessible will they be able to offer flexibility of learning and benefits to all, irrespective of disability. Experience in providing accessible online learning…

The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has been altering the Higher Education landscape in recent years. This kind of courses are penetrating in an increasing number of universities, the majority of which do not seem to have intentions to stop offering them in the short term. Such courses are generating new educational scenarios to…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are frequently portrayed as "agents of change" in higher education (HE), impacting on institutional practices, processes and structures throughout HE. However, these courses do not "fit" neatly with the established aims and functions of universities, and accounts of technology-led change in…

The potential benefits of OER have led many European governments to implement policies supporting their creation and use. This chapter aims to put these OER policies in context, discussing their focus and scope and highlighting challenges and bottlenecks. On the basis of the analysis of the current state of the art, it is argued that one of main…

This theoretical paper attempts to clarify design issues that the field of education has encountered in the context of OER (Open Educational Resources), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and increased emphasis on informal learning, as examined through the lens of the Interaction Equivalency Theorem. An overview of the core concepts of the…