Source: Alamy

Keep taking the tablet: students will soon be offered mobile access to Moocs

The first massive open online courses on the UK-based Futurelearn platform will go live in the autumn and are being developed for use on mobile devices, the company’s chief executive has revealed.

Simon Nelson said he believed that his company, which has 21 UK university partners signed up to offer free online courses, would gain an advantage over existing Mooc platforms by ensuring that its courses were designed “for mobile first, rather than as an afterthought - transforming the convenience and accessibility of learning”.

Speaking to Times Higher Education at the Open and Online Learning conference on 16 May organised by Universities UK, Mr Nelson, who in a previous role helped the BBC to set up its iPlayer service, said: “I don’t think [US Mooc platforms Coursera, edX and Udacity] are performing particularly well on mobile yet, so it may give us a short-term advantage.

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“In my experience it’s really, really hard to retrofit mobile on to platforms that haven’t had it thought about at the inception. To develop one of these services and not think about mobile portability, how it works on multiple devices, is just really old-fashioned thinking.”

The company is also looking at ways to offer Futurelearn students the option of paying for invigilated examinations, Mr Nelson said.

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This might be achieved using the company’s network of university partners. Alternatively, “an appropriate commercial partnership” with a company that offers proctored exams might be required, he said.

Mr Nelson also confirmed that the company was “looking at an autumn launch” but was unable to say how many courses he expected to go live at that point.

Some details of what Futurelearn Moocs might look like did emerge at the conference. Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of The Open University, which owns the platform, said there would be a “framework” to which participating universities would be expected to stick.

He said that a typical Futurelearn Mooc would take between six and 10 weeks to complete, require between two and six hours of study a week and comprise a combination of videos, slides and discussion broken down into “blocks and units”.

Mr Nelson dismissed concerns that these requirements might stifle the creativity of participating institutions. “Futurelearn is all about innovation. However, when you’ve got 21 partners that are radically different organisations at radically different stages, you want to create some level of consistency,” he said.

Mr Bean, who is also chairman of Futurelearn, added: “Early in the Mooc revolution it was just ‘let’s throw some video online and wrap some content around it’. That ship has sailed. Now … it requires some investment from an institution if you want to do well.”

He said that he expected it to cost “around £30,000” to develop a Futurelearn Mooc.

Although details of Futurelearn’s courses are yet to be announced, Mark Taylor, dean of the University of Warwick Business School, told the conference that his institution would be using a Futurelearn Mooc in behavioural science to carry out research on students.

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“Part of the Mooc assignment will be to take part in an online experiment that will feed back directly to researchers,” he said. “It will allow us to gather data far more easily. Currently it is difficult to get 20 or 30 students to take part in research, and we often have to pay them. Now, we will be able to reach tens of thousands for free.”

chris.parr@tsleducation.com