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Forbes Education Technology Innovation Series: Simon Nelson, FutureLearn

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A British MOOC Start Up With A 44 Year Old Parent

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

01-13-2014

Much time and attention has been given to the MOOCs started in the US, but as I have mentioned in my interview with Mike Feerick of ALISON, the phenomenon actually first emerged in Europe. Another more recent entry to the MOOC field out of the United Kingdom is FutureLearn. Unlike other prominent MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that feature university content, FutureLearn is not led by a former academic. Simon Nelson is a businessman, but he was a logical choice to head FutureLearn given his experience working in a variety of media fields that have been threatened and transformed by technology. As a result, Nelson has been programmed to see opportunity in the chaos.

FutureLearn also has the advantage of a 44 year old pre-cursor to the MOOCs: Open University. The university has many things in common with the MOOCs — it has an open entry policy, and the majority of courses are taken off-campus anywhere in the world. As such, Nelson has been able to work with Open University Vice Chancellor Martin Bean to learn from the decades of experiences and experiments forged, and many of them have translated well to the new format. Therefore, while FutureLearn is a new entrant to this marketplace, it stands to become a formidable one.

Peter High: FutureLearn recently offered its first course online. What course was chosen to be the first offering, and how it was chosen?

Simon Nelson:The first course was “The Secret Power of Brands.”  It was a ten-week course delivered by University of East Anglia. We chose it because it is both powerful but also accessible. We used our early MOOCs to test a range of course durations – ten, eight, six, and two weeks – to gain insight into what worked best for learners.

A second run of the course has been scheduled for February this year, along with a number of other courses that originally featured in 2013. The second run of “The Secret Power of Brands” has been re-versioned to run over six weeks.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

  • What lessons have you and others drawn from the experience of the Open University into FutureLearn?
  • Unlike the CEOs of several of the leading US MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX, you are not an academic.  Your background is in business generally and media more specifically. What was it about your background that made this a logical fit in your mind?
  • FutureLearn, like MOOCs generally, is in start-up mode, and therefore across the industry, the winning models have not been defined. Moreover, the impact of the MOOCs on traditional education setting has not been fully felt as yet. How do you think about the balance between FutureLearn and the traditional educational institutions that complement it?
  • In the US, MOOCs say they are needed due to the skyrocketing cost of education. In the UK, the cost of education is substantially lower. Does that reduce the power of the argument for the MOOCs in the UK?
  • In terms of developing academic content, are there different kinds of teachers who will become part of FutureLearn as a result of the unique format versus the traditional university setting and its emphasis on professors with a certain type of pedigree?
  • How do you think about competition? In the past, one’s competition might be limited to a country or a region, but the model you and others have established is global in a radical sense, as very few industries can have users in the majority of the world’s countries in a matter of weeks as some MOOCs have.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore other Education Technology Innovation Series articles, please click here.

To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.

To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Simon, click here.