Future higher education by ‚Futurelearn‘

I am sitting in the EADTU Conference on open Higher education in the Open University UK. Here I am listening to Simon Nelson, CEO of FutureLearn.

Futurelearn, the UK national MOOC Platform has just announced that they will enter into a partnership with Coventry University which intends to offer more than 50 degrees over the MOOc platform in from of modularized small standalone courses. This is a clear move towards the concept of Microcredentials. Students will have the opportunity to pick and choose models which can be studied in their own right and study them, get certification for their learning and then lateran down the road, in their own pace, learn and study and then bundle their micro credentials together into larger degrees like Bachelor or Masterdegrees.

In this scale of speed it seems now to realize what the discussion about Microdegrees raises. This is interesting news in so far as we have just started a European initiative on Microdegrees, called MicroHE (and here) and in which we will investigate how Universities can benefit from turning their traditional offers into modularized micro degrees.