Local and regional universities look to offer MOOCs as trend goes global
As the trend for massive open online courses gathers pace, universities from Britain and around the region are looking at ways to stamp their educational brand on the world, writes Kate Whitehead
Until a couple of years ago, few people had heard of them. Now massive open online courses - better known as MOOCs - seem to be everywhere, offering free access to high-quality content from the world's most prestigious universities.
It's a phenomenon that is changing our understanding of how knowledge can be distributed, and it could shake up the role of universities.
What do you have to do in a course to keep students motivated?
What began as a US trend has gone global, and it seems every university worth its salt has a MOOC, or is setting one up fast. Not to be left out, Hong Kong's top universities are also offering MOOCs. And last month, Simon Nelson, CEO of Britain's largest MOOC platform FutureLearn, toured Asia in a bid to try to partner up with universities in the region.
But not all MOOCs are born equal, and although all the courses must be open to anyone anywhere in the world, with no limit to the number of students - that's the massive and open part - some are more effectively structured than others.
Nelson had never heard of MOOCs until 16 months ago when Martin Bean, the vice-chancellor of Britain's Open University (OU), approached him to run FutureLearn. A BBC executive at the time, Nelson was head of multiplatform services and led the creation of the BBC iPlayer. Bean wanted him to apply that digital savvy to create a MOOC platform.
"This feels like a progression for me because education is one of the last great frontiers ready to be disrupted by digital. I want to help some of the leading education brands take advantage of that, rather then feel threatened by it," Nelson says.
