Open Learnity

What it is

Open Learnity is a MOOC platform where, as its home page puts it, "learners can access online courses from European institutions of higher education." It serves two readers at once. For learners it is a catalog of university courses with video lectures and assignments; for teachers and course teams at its member institutions it is the LMS they publish on. The home page calls it "an excellent place for teaching & learning" and makes four promises: courses from top institutions, high quality courses, an easy-to-use LMS for teachers, and Swiss hosting. On that last point it describes an IT infrastructure to distribute MOOCs, "hosted in Switzerland and compatible with Swiss data protection laws." The platform runs on Open edX, and the home page says it offers course planning management, "access to source and ultra scalability to millions of learners." The site is organized around the institutions behind it, with sections on its board, team, members, affiliated organizations and instructors.

Who teaches

The courses come from universities and research institutes, most of them in Switzerland. The course map can be filtered by institution, listing EPFL, ETH, FFHS, IDE, LELA, UNILI, USI and ZHAW, and the help page gives contact points for Eindhoven University of Technology, Fernfachhochschule Schweiz MOOCs, Wageningen University and Research, ZHAW Online Courses, ETH Zurich and École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. The instructors directory lists 392 instructors, each with a short biography and an institution; the EPFL panel alone counts 144. The biographies run from plasma physicists and neuroscientists at EPFL to a traffic engineering research group director at ETH Zurich, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), a postdoctoral researcher in operations research at Wageningen University and Research, nursing and finance faculty at ZHAW, a lecturer at the Distance University of Applied Sciences Switzerland (FFHS), and a former president of a cantonal juvenile court listed under the University of Geneva. Several of the biographies are in French or German, which matches the catalog.

What learners get

The home page promises "a variety of inspiring video lectures and challenging assignments from different domains and in several languages," and the course map bears that out. Its list runs to roughly a hundred courses in English, French, German and Italian, and they cluster in a few areas.

Mathematics, physics and engineering make up the largest share, much of it in French from EPFL: linear algebra in three parts, Analyse I, numerical analysis for engineers, a preparatory course on trigonometric functions, Newtonian and Lagrangian mechanics, thermodynamics, group theory, an introduction to astrophysics, plasma physics and nuclear fusion, electronics, electrotechnics and electromechanical conversion. In English there are Advanced statistical physics, Control Systems, Optimization, Autonomous Mobile Robots and Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown.

Computing courses include Agile Software Development, MATLAB and Octave for beginners (also offered in French), two parts of Computing: Art, Magic, Science, and a series on the Thymio robot as a tool for discovery, offered in English, French, Italian and German. Life sciences and medicine are well covered, with courses on cell cultivation techniques, the cellular mechanisms of brain function, neuronal dynamics, the multi-scale brain, biomedical imaging, immunology and image processing for the life sciences.

A strong strand deals with cities, environment and sustainability: Future Cities, Responsive Cities, Smart Cities, management of urban infrastructures, traffic flow modeling, landscape ecology, geographical information systems, a two-part introduction to web cartography, a Swiss energy course called Swiss-Energyscope, cement chemistry, aquaponics, and courses in French on African cities. Finance and business courses cover life-cycle financial planning, pension finance, socially responsible investment, sustainable corporate financing, land and real estate economics, global business and human rights, digital and sustainable marketing, and eTourism. Rounding the catalog off are law and humanities courses, including a course on children's rights, humanitarian action in the digital age, applied linguistics for language professionals, a course in Italian on the Commedia, and Mario Botta: To Be an Architect.

Courses for teachers and students starting out

A noticeable part of the catalog is aimed at university teaching itself. Courses include Foundations of Teaching Science and Engineering, Learning Analytics for Teachers, Basics of Adaptive Learning, a German course on video in university teaching, a German course on barrier-free teaching, and a set of implicit bias awareness courses covering fundamentals, recruitment and academic recruitment, in English and in French. One featured course from ZHAW Online Courses, "Designing effective teaching and learning with myScripting," sits in the Education and Teacher Training category alongside EPFL's "Apprendre à étudier en sciences et ingénierie," a course on learning how to study in science and engineering.

Some courses prepare new students. "Warm-up for EPFL," a math course in French, is meant for incoming EPFL students: the course page says it helps them recall notions that will be useful in their first weeks, and that it can be taken in the two weeks before the semester, "comme un échauffement avant un match" (like a warm-up before a match). It has, the page says, no real prerequisites. On the course page, the EPFL institution panel is headed "Free online courses from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne."

Finding courses

Besides the standard catalog, Open Learnity has a map of its courses, presented on the home page as "Our World of Education," which invites learners to "discover hidden connections and related topics across all our courses." The map page credits its design to EPFL's Center for Digital Education, with thanks to the Open Learnity and Graph Search teams, and includes an ontology tree. Featured courses on the home page show their subject (math, computer science, education and teacher training), the institution and a start date.

Support

The help page sets out who to contact for what. Questions on a course's content, deadlines, examination or grading go to that course's team, whose details are in the welcome or practical matters section of the course. Learners who need help enrolling, or who can no longer find a course, contact the institution offering it, and the help page lists a support address for each of the six institutions named above. The site also has an FAQ for learners and a separate FAQ for teachers and course developers.

For institutions and course teams

The platform is also a place to publish. Teachers at a member institution who want to develop a course for the catalog go through their local support, and the help page tells institutions outside the membership to write to hello@openlearnity.org. The footer links to Open edX documentation and a content creation section. For a university choosing where to put its MOOCs, the Swiss hosting and the claimed compatibility with Swiss data protection laws are the platform's main selling points.

Who it suits and who it does not

Open Learnity suits learners who want university courses from Swiss and other European institutions, especially in engineering, physics, mathematics, life sciences, urban planning and sustainable finance, and who are comfortable studying in French or German as well as English. It is a natural fit for students about to start at EPFL, for academics who want short courses on teaching, and for Swiss and European institutions that want a Swiss-hosted Open edX home for their MOOCs.

It is a less natural fit for learners who want a broad commercial catalog of job skills, since the courses reflect what the member institutions teach. Courses carry start dates, and many are taught in French or German, so a learner who only reads English will see a smaller share of the catalog.