The EMOOCs conference will be held for the seventh time, now with a focus on Europe’s role in offering open online courses to all interested parties. Those interested in submitting scientific papers can find call for papers information at https://emoocs2021.eu/.

Learning at Scale is organized for the eighth time by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and takes a global look at innovations and results of empirical research on rapidly expandable e-learning offerings. Both events provide opportunities for interaction with leading researchers, practitioners, policy makers, platform operators, and educational institutions.

As HPI Director Meinel reports, the program for this year's EMOOCs conference features six focus areas: Future Solutions, Best Practices, Health, Politics, Business, and International.

"For example, we will be looking at the topics that will affect the future such as hybrid universites, smart working environments and rapid digital training for medical staff," says the HPI director Prof. Christoph Meinel. In the field of healthcare, he adds, the focus will be on a needs analysis for MOOCs and the relevance of online education for the doctor-patient relationship.

As far as policy is concerned, the participants want to discuss, among other things, the influence of MOOCs on the labor market and the question of which conditions open online courses should fulfill in order to be recognized within a traditional training program. "We also want to look at flagship solutions in MOOC creation and show examples of the design features that lead to particularly good learning experiences," says Meinel.

In terms of business, EMOOC participants want to explore what technological and didactic requirements companies should fulfill in order to constantly accompany their workforce throughout working life. "And with international actors, especially from Latin America, Africa, Australia and Asia, we want to discuss aspects such as equality, diversity and inclusion. In doing so, we raise questions regarding the cultural background of MOOCs, possible global guidelines for them, and also the influence of the English language in online courses from U.S. learning platforms," adds the Potsdam scientist.

Meinel points out that participants can also take part in interactive workshops. All information on formats and deadlines can be found in the Call for Papers at https://emoocs2021.eu/index.php/call-for-papers/emoocs/.

The Hasso Plattner Institute launched its interactive Internet offerings as a pioneer among European scientific institutions on September 5, 2012 - on the platform open.hpi.de. Since then, it has offered free access to current university knowledge from the rapidly changing fields of information technology and innovation. So far, this has mainly been done in German, English and Chinese. In the fall of 2017, however, openHPI also offered online translation and subtitling of a course in eleven world languages for the first time. Meanwhile, more than 867,000 course enrollments have been registered on openHPI. More than 255,000 people from 180 countries belong to the platform's permanent user base. The platform continues to enjoy rapid growth. For particularly successful participants in its "Massive Open Online Courses," or MOOCs for short, the institute has issued around 95,000 certificates to date. The openHPI annual program for 2021 includes numerous offerings for IT beginners and experts. The 70 courses offered in the past can also still be used in self-study - also free of charge. In addition, students can now receive credit points at their university for completing openHPI courses. Those who want to watch video lessons from the courses while on the go , even if no Internet connection is guaranteed (for example, on an airplane), can also use the openHPI app for Android mobile devices, iPhones or iPads.

Find the full program for the conferences  here.