The last couple of months we have been working hard on the Europeana Space MOOC, which will be launched on Monday, October 10th! This MOOC confirms our focus on education. While of course the bulk of the work in Europeana Space was targeting the creative industries, running demonstrators and pilots, organizing hackathons and business modelling workshops, all with the goal of proving the case for creative reuse of Europeana contents. This doesn’t mean however that we fail to see the importance of education to have an impact on the longer run. Europeana Space first launched its Education portal, and we did presentations at several E-Learning conferences, such as Inted 2016 and Edulearn 2016. We will also present the value of Europeana for education at the OOFHEC2016 conference in Rome.

The E-Space Education portal highlights the results of the pilots and demonstrators, and gives clues how these outputs can be used in educational contexts. However, if you really want to learn how to do this, you need some more concentrated effort! This is why we decided to offer a MOOC, hosted on the edX platform. With KULeuvenX, KU Leuven university wants to bring innovative concepts to the world of online learning. Following the examples of GRAPH, a course on the Great War and Philosophy, where both online and on-campus students were actively involved, and “Trends in E-Psychology”, where a completely new field is explored, E-SpaceX offers a course which is not based on a university curriculum course, but stems directly from the action research done in Europeana Space. It is simply the other way around: from this MOOC we derive a university course, which is now offered as part of the course “Online Publishing” in the MA Cultural Studies and the MA Digital Humanities at KU Leuven.

Watch the E-Space MOOC teaser!

What can you expect from this MOOC?

Based on the E-Space pilots, there are 5 modules that teach how to engage with digitized cultural content: Photography, Open and Hybrid Publishing, TV, Dance and Museums. Besides those, there are two background modules: IP for the Cultural Entrepeneur and Creative Marketing.

The modules hold the usual videos, lectures and quizzes, but they also contain hands-on assignments. E.g., in the Photogaphy module you will make your own photostory online!.

The course is self-paced, it is not too late to register now!