The development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is reaching a level of maturity in the Higher Education area as well as inside the recognition of professional activities, after a few years of experimentation that have served to realize some of the great challenges that foreshadowed its appearance.

In parallel, LWMOOCs, already in its fifth edition, continues to grow, and now, from a different education area, the European one, it intends to contribute with the regional point of view as well as to attract a global participation, following the motto of “MOOCs for all – a social and international approach“.

The discussion continues in trends already detected in recent years as the increase in the need for continuing education to meet new digital professional profiles and the role of MOOCs to support professional development and career advancement, the new opportunities by the sheer volume of data produced by MOOCs to be explored by learning analytics researchers to identify early signals of drop out, among other issues.

But although the offer of MOOCs is growing, it is still not widespread. Only a small part of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) offer at least one MOOC although many HEIs that are not offering MOOCs at the moment intend to do so in the future. That is why the theme and guiding focus for LWMOOCs V in internationalization of initiatives to facilitate synergies and focus in joint strategies. One of the reasons lies in that there is little awareness and trust in providing recognition mechanisms of learning through MOOCs.

On the other hand, the growth of digital learning communities has been strongly stimulated with the emergence of educational models associated with MOOCs. These models need to adopt and reintroduce social connections in learning. We call for submissions to LWMOOCs V that build on the main theme of the conference and highlight the strength of the core MOOC research community on international and social issues. But not only: submissions, in general, related to research, practice, and theory related to MOOCs are also welcome.