13. Online learning opportunities
In 2008, academics at the University of Manitoba in Canada released a course for anyone who wanted to learn and had access to the Internet to enrol and learn online. This course was termed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). In 2011, Stanford University (USA) also released its three courses as MOOCs. Many of these MOOCs attracted hundreds of thousands of learners, which led to the creation of two MOOC platforms: Udacity and Coursera (the biggest MOOC platform at the moment). Subsequently, many more MOOC platforms were created whose the most popular include EdX and FutureLearn. These platforms host diverse courses in all possible field of study. Along MOOC platforms, MOOC portals were also created whose the most famous is OpenupEd created by European universities, mostly members of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU). The table below indicate most common MOOC platforms and portals.
Table 1: Some of most popular MOOC providers
|
Platform/Portal |
Logo |
URL |
location |
 |
USA |
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USA |
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UK |
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Australia |
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EU |
Most, if not all, of the MOOC platforms were created for commercial interest. While at the beginning the founders claimed to provide education free of charge to learners from all over the world, they eventually charged money for learning online or for being awarded a certificate/statement of participation. Course on most of these MOOC platforms are paced: they have a specific start date and end date. The OpenupEd portal is different in at least four aspects: 1) it is a not-for-profit MOOC initiative which build on existing open educational resources initiatives, 2) it does not host MOOCs, it rather host an aggregation (a collection) of all MOOCs hosted at open platforms of partner institutions, 3) all courses and related certificates are free of charge and 4) the course content is openly licenced which means that permission to reuse the content and share it has been granted.