A metastandard for the international exchange of MOOCs – the MOOChub as an initial prototype

The MOOChub is a website that lists well over 700 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from German-speaking countries from a total of nine different partners. In order to build such a site automatically, all partners must describe and publicly offer the metadata for their courses in the same way. This article describes the genesis of the idea of a common standard and how it was subsequently developed.
The result is an openly licensed, de-facto standard based on common existing standards, as well as an initial prototype, the MOOChub, where all parnters’ courses can now be searched and found. Finally, this paper outlines the next possible and necessary developments that will further optimise the interface.