Innovation and openness through MOOCs: Universidade Aberta's pedagogical model for non formal online courses

In face of the recent but fast growing worldwide interest on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), many universities, both open and traditional, have being discussing strategies to implement this new format of educational delivery. The huge successes of the experiences from the top universities in the United States have been an inspiration, especially to European higher education institutions. Universidade Aberta, the open university of Portugal, has been the first educational institution to develop an institutional pedagogic model for open online courses, thus issuing an institutional standard practice model for MOOCs. This paper details the institutional rationale behind this initiative, describes the pedagogical approach used and discusses the main features of the model. Finally, the authors reflect on the possible characteristics of a European-style response to the challenge of massive open online higher education.