We’re on our way to Italy! The big European MOOC conference, EMOOCs, is happening next month in the coastal city of Naples. The conference will tackle some big, future-oriented themes, including how higher education can respond to the demands of the information economy, reskilling and upskilling the workforce, and data and technology in education.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the local organizer of the conference, the University of Naples – Federico II (Federica for short), at nearly 800 years old, has dived headlong into digital strategy – with 300 courses on its own platform (Federica.eu) and 75 MOOCs available through edX.

This year’s EMOOCs conference agenda is full of big names in MOOC education. Candace Thille, Director of Stanford’s Open Learning Initiative and Director of Learning Science at Amazon, will be delivering a keynote address (she also spoke at this year’s Open edX Conference). Anant Agarwal and Simon Nelson, CEOs of edX and FutureLearn respectively, and Dil Sidhu, Chief Content Officer at Coursera, will take the stage for a set of keynotes to discuss what the future holds for MOOCs.

Class Central will be well represented at the conference. Our CEO Dhawal Shah will be delivering a keynote address on the current state of MOOCs. Also, yours truly will be hosting a panel session on the scalability of online degrees, with innovators from Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the University of London. It’s a perfect follow-on to my last conference appearance at Learning with MOOCs, where I presented research on MOOC-based microcredentials.

In addition to the plenary sessions, we’re also excited to dig into the big questions in the smaller breakouts. The EMOOCs organizers have created five tracks, covering research, experience, policy, business, and one in which all the sessions are in Italian.  Some breakout session topics that have particularly piqued our interest include virtual credit exchange, blended learning, workforce development, and how MOOCs are being used around the world.

If you are attending this year’s EMOOCs conference, be sure to find us and say hello!

Class Central is a media partner for EMOOCs. For other MOOC-related conferences, you can check out our full list of online learning conferences for 2019. We will also be at the Learning with MOOCS 2019 conference (October 23-25). Abstracts for papers for Learning with MOOCs 2019 are due May 1st.