11th January 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A number of UK universities have joined to together to offer online courses, so that they can compete with the rapidly growing market pioneered the US. Last year Harvard, Stanford and MIT began offering free courses which can be studied for online, and they have attracted millions of students. Reported on the BBC, the Open University, Kings College London, Bristol, Exeter, Warwick, East Anglia, Leeds, Lancaster, Southampton, Cardiff, Birmingham and St. Andrews have banded together to begin offering their own online courses.
A company called FutureLearn is being set up to manage the new project, and will be majority owned by the Open University, a leader in distance learning in the UK. The universities involved commented on the need to keep up with modern methods of delivering courses, or risk losing their attraction to students.
This autumn was the first since the introduction of increased tuition fees, and we saw a 54,000 drop in the number of students starting university. It’s clear that students have begun to assess the value of university education, and the new online courses offer a genuine alternative to the traditional campus-based university life, for which students must now pay £9,000 a year in tuition fees.
Much like the American courses offered, students will not yet be able to complete an entire degree online. The courses offered are designed to give students partial credit towards an undergraduate qualification, and it’s not yet clear how the online courses will be assessed, or whether universities will charge a fee for the assessment.