The first massive open online courses (moocs) on the UK-based Futurelearn platform will go live in  autumn and are being developed for use on mobile devices, the company’s chief executive has revealed.

Simon Nelson says he believes his company, which has 21 UK university partners signed up to offer free online courses, will gain an advantage over existing Mooc platforms by ensuring that its courses are designed “for mobile first, rather than as an afterthought — transforming the convenience and accessibility of learning”.

Speaking to Times Higher Education at the Open and Online Learning conference on May 16 organised by Universities UK, Nelson, who in a previous role helped the BBC set up its iPlayer service, said: “I don’t think American platforms (Mooc Coursera, edX and Udacity) are performing particularly well on mobiles yet, so it may give us a short-term advantage. In my experience it’s really, really hard to retrofit mobiles on to platforms that hadn’t thought about it at inception. To develop one of these services and not think about mobile portability, how it works on multiple devices, is really old-fashioned thinking.”

The company is also looking at ways to offer Futurelearn students the option of paying for invigilated examinations, Nelson says. This might be achieved using the company’s network of university partners. Alternatively, “an appropriate commercial partnership” with a company that offers proctored exams might be required, he says. Nelson also confirmed that the company was “looking at an autumn launch” but was unable to say how many courses he expects to go live at that point.

However, some details of what Futurelearn Moocs might look like did emerge at the conference. Martin Bean, vice chancellor of The Open University, which owns the platform, says there will be a “framework” to which participating universities will be expected to stick. According to Bean, a typical Futurelearn Mooc would take between six and ten weeks to complete, require between two and six hours of study a week and comprise a combination of videos, slides and discussions broken down into “blocks and units”.

Nelson dismisses concerns that these requirements might stifle the creativity of participating institutions. “Futurelearn is all about innovation. However, when you’ve got 21 partners that are radically different organisations in radically different stages, you want to create some level of consistency,” he says.

Bean, who is also chairman of Futurelearn, adds: “Early in the Mooc revolution it was just ‘let’s throw some video online and wrap some content around it’. That ship has sailed. Now … it requires some investment from an institution if you want to do well.” According to Bean, it will cost “around £30,000” (Rs.27.3 lakh) to develop a Futurelearn Mooc.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)