Forging new pathways of research and innovation in open and distance learning

Digital pedagogy
Changing Landscape of the Lifelong Learning Innovation in Europe
András Szűcs
In the past decade, the environment of education has changed quickly, with astonishing
developments in the macro-factors of technology, globalization, and demography. For a long
while, education has mostly been following the content delivery and assessment model, with
the main goal being the transmission of knowledge. In the digital age, technology is putting
more and more tools in the learners’ hands and education is becoming a service focusing on
the learner, providing much more freedom than earlier.
Rapid spread of cutting-edge technologies, resulted spectacular increase in demand for them
and in their use. The changing notion of access, accompanied by the increasing volume and
improving quality of digital content, and the radically transforming habits and expectations of
users have engendered new interpretations concerning several related concepts and have
repositioned the social impact of ICTs in learning.
New stakeholder alliances emerged, supported by fresh social and economic demands and
clusters of interests. Open access movement, revolutionary settings like MOOCs, atypical
learning solutions are active in transforming the scene.
The changes in the information society in the learning field have been happening meanwhile
largely outside the institutional settings and often along unexpected pathways. This was often
accompanied by contradictions and provisionality.
Among the pedagogic challenges raised by the social web, the issue of advanced online course
development, spontaneous knowledge management, is emerging. Tools are better affordable,
access to networks easy, social media spontaneously expanding and producing by the users
creative scenarios relying on the expanding power of networking. Students often use the social
web very creatively and they build up wikis to replace LMS quickly. The digital modernization
is actually just happening, progressing in the environment of the learners who are always
ahead.
According to Siemens (2013), the massive recent and cumulated achievements of research in
online and distance education have mostly been ignored. Paying attention to what is already
known about learning in online and virtual spaces, to how the role of educators and learners is
transformed and how social networks extend a learning network may enable mainstream
MOOC providers to make evidence-based decisions in favour of educational reform.
A potential example of breakthrough
A possible way forward, combining the latest achievements of the digital learning – social
media – massification – changing granularity of the learning elements can be illustrated by the
recent EdX (non-profit online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT) initiative.
MicroMasters offers promising example how a structurally innovative and disruptive initiative
may change the system. The program offered by a group of reputable universities represents a
new category of Master’s level online education to bridge the knowledge gap between higher
education and the workplace. The MicroMasters certificate as standalone credential is
340 Reaching from the roots – 9 th EDEN Research Workshop Proceedings, 2016, Oldenburg
ISBN 978-615-5511-12-7