A new approach for overcoming the language and culture barriers to participation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is reported. It is hypothesised that the juxtaposition of English as the language of instruction, used for interacting with course materials, and one's preferred language as the language of participation, used for interaction with peers and facilitators, is preferable to "English only" for participation in a MOOC. The Hands-On ICT (HANDSON) MOOC included seven teams of facilitators, each catering for a different language community. Facilitators were responsible for promoting active participation and peer tutoring. Comparing language groups revealed a series of predictors of intention to learn, some of which became apparent in the first days of the MOOC already. The comparison also uncovered four critical factors that influence participation: facilitation, language of participation, group size, and a pre-existing sense of community. Especially crucial was reaching a sufficient number of active participants during the first week. We conclude that multilingual facilitation activates participation in MOOCs in various ways, and that synergy between the four aforementioned factors is critical for the formation of the learning network that supports a social dynamic of active participation. Our approach suggests future targets for the development of the multilingual and community potential of MOOCs.

Educators of all sectors are learning designers, often unwittingly. To succeed as designers, they need to adopt a design mindset and acquire the skills needed to address the design challenges they encounter in their everyday practice. Human‐centred design (HCD) provides professional designers with the methods needed to address complex problems. It emphasizes the human perspective throughout the design lifecycle and provides a practice‐oriented approach, which naturally fits educators’ realities. This research reports the experiences of educators who used HCD to design ICT‐based learning activities. A mixed‐methods approach was used to gauge how participating educators experienced the design tasks. The perceived level of difficulty and value of the various methods varied, revealing significant differences between educators according to their level of knowledge of pedagogy frameworks. We discuss our findings from the vantage point of educators’ pedagogical beliefs and how experience shapes these. The results support the idea that HCD is a valuable framework for educators, one that may inform ongoing international efforts to shape a science and practice of learning design for teaching.

Emotional appeal is a key dimension in user experience that often goes unmeasured in most user-centered design projects. This paper presents preliminary work for developing a set of guidelines for efficiently, easily and cost-effectively assessing the users' affective state by evaluating their expressive reactions during an interface evaluation process. The evaluation of this dimension complements the analysis of the objective and quantitative data gathered through usability tests and the subjective feedback provided through post-test questionnaires.

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Many current authors point towards the heightening of networked individualism and how this affects community creation and engagement. This trend poses strong challenges to the potential beneficial effects of collective intelligence. Education is one of the realms that can strongly suffer from this globalized individualism. Learning is deeply enhanced by social interactions and losing this social dimension will have long-lasting effects in future generations. Networked learning is also a by-product of our societal context, but not per se individual. Our paper presents a case-the HANDSON Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)-in which a purposely designed learning environment fosters the emergence of a kind of collective intelligence which, by the learners own accord, brings about a heightened sense of community. The MOOC's design managed to enable individual learning paces without sacrificing the social dimension. Thus, we argue that when learning together intentionally and informally in networked online environments, small and temporary communities (pop-up communities we call them) will form. This nascent sense of community is a first step that will ultimately contribute to the common good.