Does Europe need its own Mooc?

While Moocs (massive open online courses) are on the rise in the US, little has happened in the rest of the world, with the exception of Futurelearn, the Open University partnership consisting of 17 UK universities, as well as the Berlin-based iversity. At European Union level, there have been reports about talks at the European Commission, but little action has been taken so far.

In May 2012, WiredAcademic reported that the EU's Erasmus programme might soon go online – a good start if we want to see the equivalent of Coursera on this side of the Atlantic. But this does not go far enough.

Higher education is one of the few policy areas where European unification is seen positively by most stakeholders, despite the occasional problems caused by the Bologna process. The creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has benefited most institutions by enabling them to provide comparable and compatible qualifications and compete at an international level. The Erasmus programme also continues its success, with numbers of participating students steadily growing.

What is missing from the equation is an institution that would not just bring together individual universities in Europe, but would be European in essence. At the moment there are no genuinely pan-European higher education institutions, apart from a few niche institutions in Warsaw, Florence and Bruges, specialising in postgraduate research.

Moocs constitute a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a truly European university. But it will have to be something substantially bigger than a simple online version of the Erasmus programme, and perhaps more complete than Coursera and Udacity.

Europe and the rest of the world

A European Mooc will need to have its own brand name, degree awarding powers and a viable business model that would attract international students, not just Europeans. Students should have the option to combine online and in-campus education, perhaps by splitting their on-campus time across two or even three countries, as with international dual degrees.

Some might see the language barrier as a problem, as 23 official languages and even more dialects and semi-official languages are spoken across the European Union. But as we have been repeatedly told by EU officers, Europe's advantage is its diversity.

English already has a leading position in higher education, while other European languages are dominant in some emerging higher education economies, such as Latin America. Meanwhile substantial parts of Africa have populations that speak English, French or Portuguese. In all these regions there is growing demand for higher education that local higher education systems cannot possibly meet. So a degree-awarding European Mooc could provide access to quality education to billions of people around the world in their own language.

Europe's other asset is its history and political links to other regions. Synergies with other parts of the world could come through existing institutions and programmes, and a European Mooc should not necessarily exclude non-European institutions. The Union for the Mediterranean, for example, is an international partnership bringing together 37 European, northern African and Asian countries. It has enjoyed huge success so far because it lacks a specific mandate. Here is an area where it can actually work.

As for Latin America, the Alfa Puentes programme has already opened the way for cooperation between European and Latin American universities in areas such as degree recognition, quality assurance and academic mobility, so what about sharing content?

Why does Europe need a Mooc?

There are many reasons – one is that this might be the only means of survival for smaller universities. Even before Moocs became a part of our lives, there was speculation about the imminent shrinking of the industry, with only a bunch of universities around the world, perhaps not more than 50, surviving the next few decades. What was speculation now seems inevitable, as access to online courses reduces demand for on-campus education at mid-tier institutions.

A European Mooc might also help policymakers address the worst problems facing Europe: unemployment, skills mismatches and lack of labour mobility. EU unemployment stood at 26 million people in November 2012 according to Eurostat. A big part of that number belong to the 18-29 age group, likely to be tech-savvy and capable of picking up new skills relatively quickly.

Online education could help some of them go back to employment. In capital intensive sectors such as ICT for example there are unfilled vacancies due to lack of qualified candidates. According to the European Commission, there will be a shortage of up to 700,000 ICT workers in Europe by 2015. These vacancies could be filled by young Europeans if education, employment and welfare policies focus on providing the skills needed. A European MOOC would also provide access to lifelong learning opportunities for everyone, facilitate career changes and boost mobility from one country to another. This is why it should directly link workers with employers by allowing the later to have access to students' CVs, as Coursera and Udacity do.

A European online university is also necessary to boost the nascent European identity. Umberto Eco recently argued that a whole new generation of Europeans will be needed to build a nationalism-free Europe. There is no policy area more suitable to do that than higher education, as proven by the success of the Erasmus programme. Even institutions not participating in such a project could require their students to take a couple of courses in another European language, not necessarily in English, to broaden their horizons.

Finally, a European version of Coursera might spark in Britain a debate similar to the one about the UK's membership in the European Union. A European university without a few reputable UK institutions would be a halfway house. Chances are that some of them would be glad to join a partnership including Sorbonne, Freie Universitat and the like. Would this create a split across the UK sector between Europhile and Futurelearn institutions?

Alex Katsomitros is a research analyst at the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education – follow it on Twitter @theobhe

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