If you want to make it with Moocs, you must stand out from the crowd

By Chris Parr. Edinburgh's chief information officer offers advice for Futurelearn platform. Chris Parr reports.
The UK's first massive open online course platform will succeed only if it can fend off competition from established US providers and challengers based closer to home, an expert has claimed.
Jeff Haywood, vice-principal for knowledge management and chief information officer at the University of Edinburgh - the first UK institution to offer Moocs on one of the big US platforms, Coursera - believes that the success of Futurelearn, The Open University's Mooc platform, will depend on its ability to stand out from a growing crowd.
"Moocs work only if you can get massive publicity - if you don't have the publicity, you don't have a Mooc," he said. "It is a barrier that anyone hoping to launch a Mooc has to overcome." Read more...