There’s certainly lots of activity in the MOOC (massive open online course) world at the moment. Coursera, which launched a few months ago, has just announced that it now has one million users.  It joins the increasing numbers of universities, big and small and other commercial players competing, (is that the right word?), to provide free courses. These include, amongst others, Udacity and edX.

This all takes me back to 2001 when I was editor of the BBC’s commercial learning portal, bbclearning.com. We worked with Fathom, (a Columbia University-led for-profit venture into online education that also involved the London School of Economics, British Museum, the University of Chicago, and Michigan) and other ‘suppliers’ to try and tap into the consumer learning market. As it turned out, that market didn’t exist, at least not one where consumers were prepared to pay for courses online. A decade later, we get to try again. The education world has changed a lot since then and this time around, at least for now, the courses are free. There are lots of different business models which underpin these new ventures. Many of the institutions are hoping, of course that after taking the ‘free’ course, learners will sign up for another of their fee-paying courses and in the case of the Open University’s LearningSpace, it seems this model has legs.

I’ve just signed up for Coursera’s ‘Gamification’ course (from University of Pennsylvania) which starts in a couple of weeks. I wonder what percentage of those 1 million users (including myself) will make it through to the end (or even the beginning) of their course but there are some really interesting sounding courses out there and hey, they’re free!