The Next Digital Development in Education

The world of education is being transformed through modern technologies, most particularly the web and online. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged and developed significantly during the past few years, now signing up literally millions of students onto their courses, mostly free of charge. The first MOOC was launched from Stanford and then spread to other US universities and from there to universities in other countries. The New York Times described 2012 as the ‘Year of the Mook’. The University of British Columbia’s first MOOC, on Game Theory, was launched in January 2013 (offered in collaboration with Stanford), and attracted more than 130,000 registrants, making it the largest Coursera MOOC involving a Canadian university. In the UK, a FutureLearn consortium of leading UK research-intensive universities was launched in 2013, with its first course beginning in October 2013.1 These MOOCs are, almost by definition, global — students can sign up through the Internet from anywhere in the world.