A new participative space for MOOCs: overtaking technological evolution to achieve educational innovation

The prime aim of this paper is to take a critical look at current MOOCs in order to demonstrate that the alleged techno-educational innovation is generally little more than a manifestation of the divergent interests of the stakeholders involved. Any convergence of these interests is actually rarely linked with teaching or learning. In a second step, our objective is to present the approach developed by the Université libre de Bruxelles to minimise this divergence and overcome the technocentricity of MOOCs. This approach is singular in the sense that the whole production of these open online courses is being constantly fuelled by research aimed at designing systems fully meeting – from both an educational and technical angle – the needs and usages of their users, whether teachers or students. The technological, pedagogical and scientific implications of this MOOCs development process will be assessed.