I snapped this picture two weeks ago in Camden Town, London. Apart from the clear blue skies, which were a welcome surprise for us coming from wintry Cape Town, the real excitement that day was the meeting we had with Future Learn - a project coming out of the Open University.
Future Learn has been launched in response to the MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) craze that originated in North America in 2012 and has now swept across the globe. Udacity and Coursera, two for-profit companies, are the two front runners in the MOOC race, and now Future Learn is set to become the first European-based provider to compete.
After meeting with Future Learns' CEO and Commercial Director, it's clear to me that they are not just going to add scale to the MOOC movement, but will help evolve it from where it is today towards a new model of education. I am particularly interested in how they will leverage their base that is the Open University. For some time now, the Open University has been running comprehensive online programmes that deliver exceptional education according to sound online pedagogy. And while the other MOOC providers are, for the most part, having to build this capacity as they go, Future Learn can work from an incredible base of existing knowledge on how to deliver online courses effectively.
I'm excited to see the first few courses they launch later this year.