Credit at participating institutions is possible with completion of specific courses, nodding to the European Commission’s efforts to focus more on open educational resources (OER).

Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, said: “This is an exciting development and I hope it will open up education to tens of thousands of students and trigger our schools and universities to adopt more innovative and flexible teaching methods. The MOOCs movement has already proved popular, especially in the US, but this pan-European launch takes the scheme to a new level.”

“This pan-European launch takes the scheme to a new level”

Led by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), an institutional network of Europe’s open and distance/online universities, most institutions participating in OpenupEd are open universities, including Open Universiteit in the Netherlands, Spain’s Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia and the UK’s Open University.

The portal lists information on the courses offered by participating institutions with links to enrol via their individual websites.  Subjects on offer include mathematics, e-commerce, climate change, fiction writing and languages among others. Courses are free of charge and available in at least the language of the institute’s country. Some courses are also available in Arabic.

Until now, the US has dominated the MOOC market through the platforms Coursera, EdX and Udacity. Differing from the current format, OpenupEd offers students the flexibility of time. Students can begin a course at any time and work at their own pace. All course material will be available in the public domain under the most liberal creative commons license, CC BY, which makes it open for reuse and adaptation by anyone.

Opportunity for recognition is available, either via a completion certificate or for some courses formal credit, with students paying anywhere from €25 to €400 depending on the institution and course size.

“The pan-European MOOCs initiative shows our collective passion to further innovate,” EADTU President Will Swann said. “We look to expand with a growing range of courses from the launch partners, and we will welcome new partners from across the world who share our vision and practice of flexible, responsive higher education.”

More institutions are set to join the initiative soon including Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Open University of Cyprus.