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How can we engage and enable our time-pressured teachers design rich blended and online courses (modules)? Today's education system needs to design future-looking, digitally rich, flexible courses (module), mobile-ready and attuned to students' expectations for engaging, professionally related learning experiences (UK Open University "Innovating Pedagogy 2018"). ABCtoVLE planned to develop, implement and, evaluate a rapid development learning design method in the form of a downloadable 'pack' to help university and college teachers design ICT rich blended courses, investigating a range of pedagogical, technological, support, quality, cross-cultural and strategic issues. This development includes running several workshops using the ABCtoLD (ABC to Learning Design) resource pack, methodology and to apply this to specific national requirements. ABC to LD is an effective and engaging workshop, which has been tested so far successfully on a number of educational programs in over 30 universities. In just 90 minutes, using a game format, teams are able to collaborate to create a visual "storyboard" that highlights the type and sequence of learning activities (online and offline) required to meet the learning outcomes of the course or specialization. ABC is especially useful for new specialties or in the process of modification, but also for those that turn into an online format or blended learning (with technology support). The involvement of Romanian higher education professionals is done through the full translation of the program, running workshops and supporting teachers into integrating the ABC Learning Design principles in their ongoing educational programs. This paper presents the development of the Romanian workshops by integrating the ABCtoLD principles as part of the ABCtoVLE project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented situation, when education worldwide moved online, leading to what is called Emergency Remote Teaching. Finalized one month after the suspension of face-to-face activities in schools and universities, this paper aims to capture the actions taken in Romania for the continuity of education in online environment, the strategies adopted in schools and universities to support this process, the collaboration between the educational actors and the involvement of the whole society. How prepared was the country in terms of infrastructure, teacher training, digital competences of teachers and students? How did the parents and the society get involved? What measures were taken by the Ministry of Education and Research and the educational institutions? Does this crisis make a difference even greater than the one already existent, in terms of the access to education? What educational technologies have been used, what is the role of Open Education practices and projects, the integration of Open Educational Resources and Massive Open Online Courses, of open pedagogies? How do we compare ourselves with countries with similar infrastructure, such as Bulgaria and Moldova? How have we been able to benefit from the many international initiatives, projects and resources? What are the results of the studies already carried out on the efficiency of the actions taken? What can be done better until the return to the face-to-face activities in schools and universities, expected to be in the coming months? What are the lessons learned and how do we apply this knowledge for a better future? What current practices will have an impact on the teaching-learning activity, on the opening of education?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of distance education activities in the Politehnica University of Timisoara have different aspects and requires several development instances. Recently, the online development included also tools needed for human resources management and time management. Politehnica University of Timisoara uses, since 2009, the university Virtual Campus CVUPT, a Moodle based development. As many of Moodle instances are used in distance education settings, where activities happen also face-to-face in university labs, any off-platform relevant activities need to be reported and quantified manually. This is especially important in our university educational setting, where reported activity affects many teaching/learning indicators, including the academic staff' time reports. In order to properly mitigate this situation, we have developed a tool allowing Moodle integration with the official reporting procedure used by the academic staff from the distance education courses in our University. In this paper, we present the new methodology, the development process as well as the initial evaluation, by comparing the process of obtaining results from offline, previous form-based reports submitted in the past, with those obtained using the online tool in CVUPT. The evaluation run by the eLearning Center team revealed important feedback on time management, that will generate more change, many updates and other adaptations of the reporting tool in CVUPT. We can conclude that, for its first iteration, the online reporting tool was seen as a positive development, conducted to better time management of the distance education academic staff. Several proposed improvements are already in plan for the second development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of distance education activities in the Politehnica University of Timisoara have different aspects and requires several development instances. Recently, the online development included also tools needed for human resources management and time management. Politehnica University of Timisoara uses, since 2009, the university Virtual Campus CVUPT, a Moodle based development. As many of Moodle instances are used in distance education settings, where activities happen also face-to-face in university labs, any off-platform relevant activities need to be reported and quantified manually. This is especially important in our university educational setting, where reported activity affects many teaching/learning indicators, including the academic staff' time reports. In order to properly mitigate this situation, we have developed a tool allowing Moodle integration with the official reporting procedure used by the academic staff from the distance education courses in our University. In this paper, we present the new methodology, the development process as well as the initial evaluation, by comparing the process of obtaining results from offline, previous form-based reports submitted in the past, with those obtained using the online tool in CVUPT. The evaluation run by the eLearning Center team revealed important feedback on time management, that will generate more change, many updates and other adaptations of the reporting tool in CVUPT. We can conclude that, for its first iteration, the online reporting tool was seen as a positive development, conducted to better time management of the distance education academic staff. Several proposed improvements are already in plan for the second development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a paradigm in academic teaching and research. Year of 2012 has been declared as "the year of MOOCs" marking the point when renowned universities have joined their efforts with private companies in order to offer open and free, online education. MOOCs have been used in a plethora of scenarios, starting with offering entire courses and specializations and ending in blending them in university courses. Consequently, a large amount of research has been directed towards the evaluation of MOOCs' usage and existent solutions. Big data techniques, machine learning algorithms, sentiment analysis are just a few of the techniques used to evaluate MOOCs-based teaching scenarios. One of the research subject which is still under development is that of applying MOOCs into private companies. How many companies are using MOOCs? Which are the scenarios in which the MOOCs are being used? What benefits are mainly looked after by the companies? Even if we find different state-of-the-art papers giving different guidelines about how the industry can actually take advantage of MOOCs, the application of MOOCs into industrial environments, projects and teams is still a topic that needs to be further addressed. The aim of this paper is to understand the degree in which private companies are using MOOCs. In this regard, the present study targeted international companies, but also organizations from Europe and Romania. The results are extremely promising into further developing of the presented approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of augmented and virtual reality technologies offers students an opportunity to become more familiar with these technologies and their applications in business context. This paper shares results of the TalkTech project, in which first-year introductory technology students from a university in the United States and fourth-year multimedia students from a university in Romania study uses of augmented reality in a variety of industries, create original augmented reality artifacts, and demonstrate their results with international partners. Using Internet-based communication tools to collaborate, students investigate the possibilities that augmented reality enables. The assignment promotes creativity using technology as students develop original artifacts that demonstrate their understanding of augmented reality as applied to a variety of business contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short videos, also known as micro-videos, have emerged as a platform for sharing ideas, experiences, and life events on online social networks. This paper shares preliminary results of a study involving students from two universities who created six-second videos using the Vine mobile app to explain or illustrate technology concepts. An analysis of their videos shows that the six-second constraint often inspires creativity and critical thinking, as students need to carefully consider the message they wish to convey, and how they can do so effectively in a compelling micro-video. The creation of such videos provides a way to demonstrate student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a significant growth in the number and quality of Open Educational Resources that are published online. These resources are published both in an education-specific context, in open educational repositories, specifically built for storing educational material, and in a generic context, for other purposes, but having a relevance to teaching and learning. The current map of OER repositories shows a heterogeneous landscape, due to various tools, methods and standards used for publishing the educational content. Significant effort has been made in promoting standards such as SCORM and IEEE LOM, to facilitate reusability of educational resources. However, the current amount of Open Educational Resources lacks integration and interoperability. To address these issues, the Linked Data principles can be used to discover, integrate and reuse educational content published online. Linked Data has been proven to foster web interoperability at a general level, by providing now widely used principles and standards, such as RDF and SPARQL. Steps for publishing Open Educational Resources as Linked Data include: selection of data sources, modelling the data through the use of vocabularies and ontologies, conversion to the RDF data model, including cleaning of the data, publishing the semantic-enriched data to Linked OER Repositories and consuming the data, usually through SPARQL endpoints. As a result of this process, a significant number of educational datasets are currently published as Linked Data by universities, government institutions, publications and specific projects in this area. This paper presents a literature review of the current efforts toward publishing of Open Educational Resources as Linked Data. It also highlights some research challenges and suggests suitable approaches to overcome these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Open Educational Resources (OER) provides opportunities for collaboration both in the classroom and beyond. Many universities have embraced video conferencing tools such as Skype and Google Hangouts for common learning activities with students in classrooms across the street, across the country, or across the globe. This paper describes an ongoing collaboration between two universities, one in the United States and the other in Romania, where students use synchronous and asynchronous communication tools to complete a combined work product during the course of a semester. The project requires students to create, curate and publish digital media using established and emerging open educational and social media tools such as VoiceThread, ThingLink, SoundCloud, and YouTube. Each year, students work in groups with their international partners to create digital media artifacts that share their findings related to a current technology trend. Students chronicle their work, share resources, and collaborate using the ViCaDiS (Virtual Campus for Digital Students) platform and select the means of digital communication that they deem most appropriate for the various tasks involved. In the process, they also experience global cultures while communicating with develop critical thinking and problem solving skills while using the Web as a research tool. This paper presents an analysis of student and faculty experiences over a five-year period using a variety of open educational tools as resources for creating an international Connectivist, learning environment. The analysis is based on authors' records, initial and final surveys of student experiences each year, and their feedback. The paper concludes with recommendations on using these tools as OER in an international collaborative learning environment using Connectivist principles, thus creating a Connectivist OER (xOER). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Started in 2008 and gathering momentum over the past two years, now an online phenomenon, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) reunite different perspectives over a globalized online learning. The 'pure' and initial ones integrate the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources. The others are based on online LMS's where "open" students, can join in some or all of the course activities, which might include watching videos, posting on discussion boards and blogs, and commenting via social media platforms or on chat rooms. Widely it is accepted that MOOCs are disruptive - by their very nature they tell a different narrative to that of the traditional university. But all major players in the higher education field have initiated, created or joined a MOOC in the last years. The most successful ones are in widely used languages as English, Spanish or German. Four universities from Romania started a Romanian MOOC environment, which provides free access to valuable education in Romanian language, presented by well-known professors. This papers presents the planning, structuring but also the technological and pedagogical models used in creating the Romanian MOOC. Which one from the MOOC models and LMS the Romanian courses can adopt and integrate? How Romanian students can be encouraged and motivated in attending these courses and how the use of OER and social networking can be encouraged? These are just some of the questions which the paper answers, based on the Romanian MOOC development, the enquiries and surveys generated in the universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the higher education system in Romania has been through a series of transformations. These transformations reflects European tendencies but also the changes due to the new Romanian Education Law. The universities involved in this project, described here, are at the avant-garde of these changes and promote innovation in post-graduate education. But are the prospective students and the universities ready to take the challenge? And is it the eLearning environment going to be a viable model for a multi-regional Masters degree? A study, which focuses on the first semester of piloting, was conducted recently in order to answer these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the research results of a training needs analysis for university academia in 12 universities, within the aim of designing a training course for improving the use of ICT in 12 universities. The results indicates that even if some tools are widely used in universities, they are not fully implemented in delivering education and there is also a digital divide between the different academia generations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]