Dive Brief:
- Massive open online courses have been over-hyped, says FutureLearn CEO Simon Nelson.
- According to Nelson, platforms like Coursera, Udacity, and EdX overstated how disruptive they could be, and MOOCs won’t likely transform education or destroy universities, Times Higher Education reported.
- MOOCs also won’t be a short-term phenomenon, and they will be part of a transformation of higher ed by the Internet, he said.
Dive Insight:
Nelson gave his opinions during a Times Higher Education podcast. His United Kingdom-based MOOC provider has launched 133 courses in 12 months. More than 650,000 students have signed up 1.4 million times for FutureLearn's courses. Nelson dislikes the MOOC term, however, preferring “social learning platform" instead.
