The consortium consists of a mix of higher academic institutions and enterprises, all expert organizations in the fields of MOOCs, collaborative learning, conversational agents, Learning Analytics, educational software and policy reform.

The consortium was designed to broadly cover a wide geographical ground and consists of nine partners in five different countries (Greece, Denmark, Spain, Germany, UK):

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Aristotle University Of Thessaloniki

Partner website

The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) comprises 7 Faculties organized into 33 Schools, 5 faculties with only 1 school each, as well as 4 independent Schools (a total of 42 Schools). 

More than 72000 undergraduate and postgraduate students study at the Aristotle University, 62.000 in undergraduate programmes and 10.000 in postgraduate programmes.

AUTH's team is involved in the Multimedia Laboratory (http://mlab.csd.auth.gr) of the Department of Informatics (http://www.csd.auth.gr). The Department of Informatics (http://www.csd.auth.gr) was established in 1992 as a part of the Faculty of Sciences of AUTH. The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was ranked within the top 200 universities in the subject "Computer Science and Information Systems" according to a recent study conducted by the QS company. The activities of the Multimedia Laboratory of the Department of Informatics (http://mlab.csd.auth.gr) are in the domain of learning technologies and educational evaluation. AUTH's team has participated in various projects undertaking similar roles as in colMOOC project. Examples are:

  • "Hellenic academic opencourses
  • Project "Education of foreign and repatriated students",
  • eSience (Reseau maghrebian de laboratoires ? distance)


User Group

The project will target three groups:

Academic community

University students.Enrolled students require increased flexibility and support, something that cannot be always available in a university system that deals with rising number of students and limited funds.

University teachers.As MOOC elements and online pedagogies are integrated into university curricula, the use of techniques, such as learning analytics, that could provide a holistic view of the learning activity would be valuable for the teachers, in their effort to improve their courses.

Academic institutions. The integration of conversational agents and learning analytics into MOOCs would allow the universities to offer more flexible and engaging ways of teaching. This would allow the universities to reach wider demographic (based on age, occupation, etc.) and address the need for lifelong learning.

Training community

Learners.The project will provide an enhanced learning experience for the online learner, offering at the same time different ways to formal education, lifelong learning, and training.

Trainers. Trainers are in need of innovative, engaging and motivational learning methods in order to attract the attention of the employees of any sector during training sessions. In addition, trainers should be able to easily design courses and material and monitor their trainees' progress during sessions. This way, they will be able to adapt the process accordingly, change the real world scenarios used as problems that need solving and foster the employees' skills development.

SMEs. European SMEs continuously need to train their employees to improve the competitive advantage of the enterprise. SMEs can be benefited by adopting a colMOOC training approach thus being able to provide personalized training to their employees and being able to monitor their progress.

Technology providers

Tool developers. Learning tool developers (e.g., MOOC plug-in developers) need to provide high quality personalized software products to their customers.

Content providers. Learning content providers (e.g. MOOC providers) aim at making their content easily accessible to a great number of users.