Brussels, December 2014 - Twelve universities and businesses in eight European countries are participating in an EU project called EMMA (European Multiple MOOC Aggregator). Supported by funds from the European Union's "Competitiveness and Innovation" Program, the EMMA project is described as a thirty-month pilot project that provides access to MOOCs "in various languages and is supported by automatic transcription".
The first EMMA MOOCs went online in September 2014 and were provided by universities in Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the UK. Topics included corporate governance, social innovation and cultural heritage, and climate change.
EMMA operates in two modes: as an aggregator and hosting system for courses of European universities and as a system that allows learners to create their own learning paths with units of MOOCs as building blocks. Moreover, EMMA is open to other providers who want to make their MOOCs available in multiple languages and across national borders.
A European Commission report on new forms of learning in higher education recommends, among other things, that Member States include support for greater local and global cooperation and cited the EMMA platform as a reference project for this effort.
Project coordinator Rosanna De Rosa is convinced that, “The platform offers exciting opportunities for students and MOOC providers across Europe." The pilot projects, which ran in seven countries with a total of sixteen MOOCs, succeeded in attracting 60,000 participants.
