An Unconventional MOOC as a Solution for Short Budgets and Young Researchers in Europe

The MOOC ‘Magic in the Middle Ages’, organized by the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) with the collaboration of the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), is an unconventional course even for an e-learning platform. It is being created by a group of interdisciplinary and inter- university lecturers and a team of organizers that is intended to be self-sufficient in order to create a brand new MOOC with a non-existent budget. A hotly debated topic is whether European universities are able to compete with the MOOCs offered by North-American institutions, which are often the results of huge investments (Ruth, 2014). Our MOOC faces this problem but it also advantageously benefits from the comp etences that today’s young researchers generally have (new technologies, social networks, multilingualism) and offers them an opportunity to pursue a teaching and research career and to make new contacts with professors from other European universities in a moment in which their affiliation to a university cannot be taken for granted