In the last years, the concept of Virtual Mobility has receiving a growing attention from educational policy makers and institutions, because it has the potential to make more accessible and effective students and teachers mobility in Higher Education. Virtual Mobility could be defined as institutional ICT-supported activities that trigger or facilitate international collaborative experiences in the context of teaching and/or learning. Despite the interest, there is still a few empirical researches regarding actual effectiveness of Virtual Mobility implementation and which technological solutions could be adopted. The present paper describes a research project aimed at designing an Open and Accessible Virtual Mobility Massive Open Online Course, by involving students and teachers from six European countries and higher education institutions. 716 participants completed and assessed the Open Virtual Mobility MOOC. Participants expressed a positive evaluation of different MOOCs features: (a) Badges; (b) Technical features; (c) Gamification. Four out of eight MOOCs obtained the highest evaluation: (a) Collaborative learning; (b) Autonomy-drive learning; (c) Open-mindedness; (d) Intercultural skills. Future research trajectories would be described.
The rapidly growing number of learning materials and repositories makes the issue of how to find the most relevant and best quality resources to be integrated in teaching and learning offers. Thus, effective quality assessment tools are more and more needed. In the present paper, a case-study focusing on quality assurance in a Virtual Mobility (VM) international project is presented. VM stands for ICT supported activities, organized at higher institutional level, that makes possible or facilitate international, collaborative experiences in a context of teaching and/or learning. Different approaches were combined to ensure the quality of a specific MOOC and the OERs created to promote VM. Three main macro-indicators were identified for OERs evaluation: 1. Quality, 2. Appropriateness, and 3. Technical aspects. Each project partner was invited to search, select and peer-assess OERs related to the skills necessary to be engaged in VM. First results of the peer-review activity and future directions to ensure OpenVM OERs and MOOC quality are presented.
<p class="0abstract"><span lang="EN-US">The present work describes the structure of a pilot study which was addressed to test a tool developed to automatically assess Critical Thinking - CT Levels through language analysis techniques. Starting from Wikipedia database and lexical analysis procedures based on n-grams, a new approach aimed at the automatic assessment of the open-ended questions, where CT can be detected, is proposed. Automatic assessment is focused on four CT macro-indicators : basic language skills, relevance, importance and novelty. The pilot study was carried out through different workshops adapted from Crithinkedu � EU Erasmus + Project model aimed at training university teachers in the field of CT. The workshops were designed to support the development of CT teaching practices at higher education level and enhance University Teachers’ CT as well. The two-hour workshops were conducted in two higher educational institutions, the first in the U.S.A (CCRWT Berkeley College NYC, 26 university teachers) and the second in Italy (Inclusive memory project - University Roma Tre, 22 university teachers). After the two workshops, data were collected through an online questionnaire developed and adapted in the framework of the Erasmus + Crithinkedu project. The questionnaire includes both open-ended and multiple choice questions. The results present CT level shown by university teachers and which kind of pedagogical practices they intend to promote after such an experience within their courses. In addition, a comparison between the values inferred by the algorithm and those calculated by domain human expert is offered. Finally, following up activity is shown taking into consideration other sets of macro-indicators: argumentation and critical evaluation.</span></p>
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