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One of the main barriers to the reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER) is language (OLnet, 2009). OER may be available but in a language that users cannot access, so a preliminary step to reuse is their translation or localization. One of the obvious solutions to the vast effort required to translate OER is to crowd-source the translation, as exemplified by Wikipedia (Wikipedia Translation) or TED (Ted Open Translation Project). From October to December 2012 the Department of Languages at the Open University UK ran a MOOC on Open Translation Tools and Practices (OT12). Participants explored a range of online open translation tools (Amara, Transifex, Google Translator Toolkit) that enable and facilitate the crowdsourcing of translation, dubbing and subtitling. For this MOOC, participants collaborated in the translation and subtitling of OER mainly to and from English and Spanish, but also Portuguese, French, Greek, German and Catalan. Forum discussions, synchronous online sessions, recorded podcasts and the tasks themselves were designed to provide input, facilitate discussion and share views not only on the linguistic specificities of translating different languages, but also on issues such as quality assurance in open translation and the ethics and practicalities of openness in education and translation. Data for this paper is drawn from online surveys covering participants' backgrounds and their prior experience as translators; their expectations and motivation for participating in the OT12 MOOC; and their evaluation of the outcomes of the MOOC. We understand MOOCs as events (Cormier, 2010) or, following the principles of connectivism, catalysts for starting conversations within a network (Downes, 2011), and therefore feel that they might be a suitable way of engaging online communities of translators, language teachers and learners, and those interested in the crowdsourcing of translations for OER. This paper attempts to open up a debate on how the world of open education can harness crowdsourcing and existing open translation models to further the openness agenda.

This article describes the rationale for pedagogical, technological and organisational choices in the design of a virtual learning environment (VLE) for an upper-intermediate Spanish course with regard to the roles of participants (tutors, moderators and learners). We report on findings from a preliminary evaluation of the interaction between the different actors and this space, using quantitative and qualitative data obtained from interviews, questionnaires and analysis of usage logs. We look at the tensions that emerge as tutors and learners adopt new roles and engage in new pedagogical relationships around the opportunities afforded by this kind of teaching and learning space. We argue that our attempt to promote interaction through our VLE model has resulted in a contested space where traditional hierarchies and relationships between tutors and learners are in a state of flux and where new hierarchies and relationships are constantly being forged. Finally we explore new ways in which tutors' roles might be organised to more effectively fulfil their supportive and facilitative functions in this new online environment. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

This study examines the sensitivity of future long-term care demand and expenditure estimates to official demographic projections in four selected European countries: Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. It uses standardised methodology in the form of a macro-simulation exercise and finds evidence for significant differences in assumptions about demographic change and its effect on the demand for long-term care, and on relative and absolute long-term care expenditure. It concludes that mortality-rate assumptions can have a considerable influence on welfare policy planning. Relative dispersion between country-specific and Eurostat official estimates was found to be higher for the United Kingdom and Germany than for Italy and Spain, suggesting that demographic projections had a greater influence in those countries.