In Brussels, yesterday, Androulla Vassiliou (European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth) announced that the \”first pan-European\” MOOC platform will be launched on 25 April 2013. As Commissioner Vassiliou put it:

\”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. It reflects European values such as equity, quality and diversity and the partners involved are a guarantee for high-quality learning. We see this as a key part of the Opening up Education strategy which the Commission will launch this summer.\”

This multi-institutional European MOOC platform (available via www.OpenupEd.eu) is to be formally launched at the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands on Thursday 25 April (11:00-12:00 CET).

The global dimensions of the MOOC juggernaut is coming into view, and evolving, very quickly. As noted in these entries:

Globalizing MOOCs
The making of a MOOC at the University of Amsterdam
Memo to Trustees re: Thomas Friedman’s ‘Revolution Hits the Universities’
Are MOOCs becoming mechanisms for international competition in global higher ed?

as well as in numerous other media releases and media stories, select countries and regions are reacting to the fast paced growth of MOOC platforms like edX, and especially Coursera, with initiatives of their own. MOOCs (as currently envisioned) first emerged in Canada, and then were propelled by higher education institutions and firms located in the Bay Area and Boston city-regions of the United States in 2012. Additional MOOC platforms emerged in Milton Keynes in the UK (Futurelearn) in December 2012, Berlin (iversity) in Germany in March 2013, Sydney in Australia (Open2Study) in March 2013, and now Europe\’s OpenupEd as of this coming Thursday.
In the next week or so I\’ll post a proper analysis of the various platforms and their associated developmental logics. I\’ll also update you about the European MOOCs in Global Context workshop (June 19-20) I am organizing here at UW-Madison. It\’s also worth noting that Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is holding a European MOOC Summit in early June.

The global landscape of MOOC platforms is churning very fast, reinforcing the need to engage in some reflective dialogue about this phenomenon.