Making MOOCs matter in formal education through a federating environment

With the emergence of open education and MOOCs, the opportunities and contribution of non-formal learning to the acquisition of knowledge and skills have increased. This type of learning, which has the advantage of being voluntary relying mainly on the learners' motivation, remains technically invisible to formal learning environments. Finding suggest that the formal learning becomes increasingly less adapted to the learners needs because it does not take into consideration the real learner's profile (knowledge, skills, etc.) updated by non-formal learning. In order, to bridging formal and non-formal learning, we are aiming to personalize formal learning by recovering the learner's knowledge, abilities and skills which are acquired by non-formal learning (MOOCs). We propose in this paper, a federating environment for MOOCs hosted in different platforms such as (Coursera, open EdX..). The main objective of this environment is to provide to the formal learning environment a recommender system of MOOCs. The technical aspects of a federating environment of MOOCs (FEM) are presented. FEM is composed of an integration system and a recommender system of MOOCs. The integration system is responsible for integrating data emanating from different heterogeneous MOOCs platforms. The recommender system is based on the learners' profiles and on the pedagogical objectives set by the concerned establishment that integrates the federating environment FEM. FEM also enables establishments to adapt the formal learning through the enriched learners' profiles. © The Authors, 2017.