OERs and MOOCs — The Romanian experience

Using Open Educational Resources (OER) provides opportunities for collaboration both in the classroom and beyond. 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 paper analyses the use of OER and MOOCs in different study cases in Romanian universities. Several OER initiatives resulted from the over 1000 academia involved in the DidaTec lifelong learning and training for higher education teachers in the technical sciences and engineering field as a training course for university professors in 12 universities, within the aim of improving the use of ICT in higher education. Four universities from Romania started a Romanian MOOC environment, the UniCampus, which provides free access to valuable education in Romanian language, presented by well-known professors. The evaluation and quality assurance challenges of the Unicampus are mainly due to the restrictive educational setting in Romania. Two study cases on blending MOOCs in traditional higher education courses at undergraduate and Master level are also analysed from the impact on students' motivation. Integrating MOOCs in blended learning empower students with new abilities and requires a new and open teacher model.