Globalization of MOOCs: Futurelearn announces first courses

When you think of MOOCs, edX, Coursera and Udacity come to mind, but global online education is taking off.

Futurelearn, a coalition of 20 UK and international universities, the British Museum, British Library and British Council, has just launched with 20 courses starting this fall and winter. The courses are 6 or 7 weeks long and require 2 or 3 hours per week.

I checked out their "beta" Web site and few things caught my attention.

Their slogan is "Learning for life," indicating a focus on students who are not seeking credit and degrees. That audience may turn out to be more important than traditional university students -- more lucrative and more beneficial to society.

They also show interest in training for job-related skills. One of the initial courses is Dental photography in practice.

Their tagline is Enjoy free online courses from leading UK and international universities, indicating a global focus. In addition to international universities, they will be serving international students. One of their partners is The British Council, the UK international cultural organization, which offers classes (online and off) and arranges cultural and educational exchanges and events. The British Council has offices in 116 nations and they will no doubt help with marketing and spreading the word.

Futurelearn is later to the game than the big three U. S. MOOC providers, but the game is just beginning -- the technology, pedagogy and place in society of online education are all changing rapidly. Furthermore, FutureLearn is a private company wholly owned by the Open University, which has been doing distance education (online and off) since 1971.

I've enrolled in a course and am anxious to see their platform and pedagogy. Stay tuned.

The access and bandwidth divide in online education

What if online classes and MOOCs really do take over the world? Will that exacerbate the "digital divide?" Will poor and rural US students have to seek out public libraries and other public access spots? An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education focuses on that question.

What about students in developing nations? Good luck taking a Coursera course in, say, Myanmar or Cuba. In much of the world, Internet access is too expensive for the average person and, even if they can get online, too slow to effectively use a modern Web site.

As online courses increase in sophistication, bandwidth will become an even greater impediment to participation.

The Guinean students shown here are studying under street lights (click to enlarge). Will they have access to global online education?
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Update 3/6/2013

A followup article talks about the impact of data caps for online students in the US. Again, the situation is much worse in developing nations.
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Update 12/8/2013

A University of Pennsylvania study of a million users who signed up for one of 17 courses they offered through Coursera showed that few were from developing nations.

Massive, open, online classes -- presentation scales, does interaction?

Coursera has added 17 universtities to their list of collaborators, bringing the total to 33. They have reached over 1.3 million students in 195 countries and raised raised $22 million in venture capital and received $3.7 million in equity investments from Caltech and Penn.

Not a bad start for a company that was founded last fall and funded in April.

But, many, including me, have wondered whether it is possible to capture the peer-reinforcement and contact of a classroom online. Coursera (and others) hypothesize that students can communicate with each other online -- if there are 10,000 people in a course, someone in some time zone is going to be working on the same lesson at the same time as you.

Students have taken interaction a step further, with course-specific groups meeting face to face. As of this morning, 7,839 Coursera students had formed 1,119 communities on Meetup.com in 1,014 cities and 2,824 Udacity students had formed 478 communities in 453 cities.

Coursera Meetup cities

I live in Los Angeles, so checked to see what was happening around here. It turned out that there are 78 registered Courserians in Los Angeles and smaller numbers in the many cities making up the metropolitan area.

Coursera meetups in Los Angeles (partial)

The three largest Coursera community cities are Stanford with 979 members, New York with 241 and San Francisco with 213. But the most interesting to me are the next three -- Bangalore with 183 members, London with 172 and Moscow with 144.

Courera meetups in Bangalore, India

This reminds us that online education is a global phenomena. Courses are being offered in many nations and students from many nations are taking them.

In Version 1 of the book, Gutenberg pruduced copies of hand written bibles. In Version 1 of the motion picture, we put cameras in front of stage plays. Version 1 of radio featured oral drama. Version 1 of television resembled vaudeville and stage skits. Etc.

Version 1 of the online course was to teach the same class from the same textbook using the same PowerPoint slides and videos that come with the textbook, substituting email and threaded discussion for face to face meetings in a classroom. The results have been OK, but not spectacular.

Coursera and many others are experimenting with Version 2. They have massive scale in their favor, and perhaps student-organized meetups and online groups for peer grading and feedback will enable them to scale interaction as well as presentation.

Movies, Version I

Television, Version I

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Update 7/10/2013

Coursera has raised an additional $43-million. Investors must have confidence in their ability to eventually make money. For more on this investment in Coursera and their plans, see this article.

Global online education is taking off

Education cost and consumer prices

As shown here, the cost of education (in the US) is rising faster than general inflation. At the same time, voters are cutting spending on public education. As a result, online schools are springing up all over. There are many variations on the theme, and it will be fascinating to see which models survive. Here are some examples:

• Calstate online: Charge tuition and grant degrees. Self-sustaining, non-profit.
• edX: Free for now, but will they one day offer certificates for a fee? Large cash endowment, but what happens when that runs out?
• The Khan Academy: Free forever? Contract with school districts? Foundation support.
• Udacity and Coursera: Venture backed university spin offs are free for now, but investors will want income in the future.
• NPTEL, the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning: Produced by the Indian Institutes of Technology. Government funded and free.
• Open University: Grants degrees and charges tuition (discount for UK students).
• Open University Learning Space: Free online courses from 1-20 hours long from the Open University and the BBC.

Venture capital comes to education

There are also students with different goals:

• Young people seeking a degree or certification at the beginning of their careers
• Working people seeking a degree or certificate in order to improve their positions
• Working people seeking training in a specific job skill
• Curious people who want to learn about a subject as an end in itself
• Curious people who want to acquire a skill as an end in itself

To make matters even more interesting, while US entries in the online education have been getting a lot of attention, this is a global phenomenon. We see offerings from the US, UK, India, Namibia and many other nations. Needless to say, there are also online students in every nation.

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Update 4/10/2013

UK Universities Minister David Willetts urged university leaders to invest in the "historic opportunity" presented by global online education.  The BBC article covering his talk also summarizes current online education efforts in the UK and places them in a global context.

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Update 4/25/2013

Coursera has launched its first international course, Science, Technology, and Society in China I: Basic Concepts, from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 17,000 students registered for the three-week course -- around 60 percent of them from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other rich nations, with the rest from countries like Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and middle-income countries in Asia.  The article continues with an interesting discussion of the opportunity and barriers presented by the Chinese market for online education.  Will it be open or dominated by Chinese companies and universities?  Will Chinese universities and faculty be allowed to use Coursera and other platforms or will China erect a "walled campus?"  This course is in English -- will Coursera offer classes in Mandarin?

Other posts on MOOC globalization.

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Update 7/8/2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles five international MOOC providers:

• Schoo (Japan)
  
• Open2Study (Australia)
  
• Veduca (Brazil)
  
• FutureLearn (Britain)
  
• iversity (Germany)

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Update 10/3/2013

Futurelearn, a coalition of universities in the United Kingdom, announced their first round of courses recently and now Udacity, with support from Google, has announced an effort to translate their existing courses. You can see an example here, with closed captions available in a variety of languages. Will English with sub-titles be sufficient or will students prefer native language presentation?

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Update 10/12/1013

list of MOOC providers They say it is up to date as of September 27 th.

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Update 10/16/2013

Two European MOOC providers, iversity and Futurelearn, are launching this month. The first course offered by Futurelearn, a coalition of UK universities, starts October 21. It is an ecology course called "Fairness and nature: When worlds collide" and it will only last two weeks. I will enroll to get a look at the Futurelearn delivery platform.
Iversity began with a scholarship from the German Federal Ministry of Science and Technology and is now venture funded. They will be offering MOOCs by university professors from around the world and are launching with six courses this month. Their course promotion videos are innovative, for example, combining video and graphics and using 3D video, as shown below. I want to keep an eye on their platform as well.

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Update 11/4/2013

Global competition is heating up. Coursera is establishing "learning hubs" around the world and has found a Chinese parnter, NetEase.

Coursera learning hubs

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Update 1/17/2014


Two thirds of all MOOC users live abroad in countries like Rwanda, Kenya, China, and Brazil according to this post by David Blake.

His post includes links to these MOOC providers:

ALISON (Ireland), Ewant (China), FutureLearn (United Kingdom), iVersity (Germany), Open2Study (Australia), Rwaq (Saudi Arabia), Schoo (Japan), UniMOOC (Spain), Veduca (Brazil), and XuetangX (China).

The online education market is global

There has been a lot of talk about and investment in open online classes from elite US universities like MIT, Harvard and Stanford, but let's not lose sight of the fact that online education is a global market -- on both the supply and demand sides.

Excellent universities in other nations than the US are offering classes, certificates and degrees online. There are Big Names like the Inidan Institutes of Technology, Cambridge, and Oxford and not-so-big names like the University of Namibia. Universities big and small in every language group are thinking about distance education today -- we can look forward to a lot of competition and choice.

The student population is also global. Stanford's AI course had students from 190 countries.  The class was also free, and the most exciting promise of open online education is that it can reach the disenfranchised.

One is reminded of the story of the young mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan rising to fame after writing Professor G.H. Hardy at Cambridge from his village in Southern India. (His first two letters to Hardy are said to have been returned unopened). Tomorrow's Ramanujan will have a much easier time getting the attention of his tutors. How many Ramanujans will we find enrolled online and what will be their contribution to humanity?

I can't leave this post without pointing out the irony that Springer publishes a math journal named after Ramanujan. The print version of Ramanujan is $719 per year plus $67.50 shipping and handling and the electronic version is $590. Ramanujan could not have afforded it -- but the disruption of academic publishing is a different post.