A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online space for learning with no prerequisites for entry. All content is delivered online and learners interact with the content by navigating through it, assessing their progress, writing down their knowledge, and sometimes interacting with other students. The European project Information Literacy Online is an example of a MOOC. It has a number of set goals: it should teach the basics of information literacy to undergraduate students, it should offer study in six European languages, it should deliver content that can be re-used, it should be used mostly by self-paced learners who progress at their own speed through the content, and subsequently assess and see their progress as they go.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how to build a multilingual MOOC in a location-independent and distributed collaboration scenario. The project requirements have shaped a content creation process, an authoring workflow, which we present in this paper. While the MOOC is delivered on the OpenEdX platform, the authoring workflow is centered around a versioning system which has allowed quality control processes, automated transformation processes, and the contribution of content from multiple places to occur in an asynchronous manner. This paper describes the workflow, sketches the technical choices made in the process, the issues encountered and their workarounds and reports on the experience gained thus far.