Yawn.

This week FutureLearn leaunched its first MOOCs. FutureLearn is the company set up from the Open University to be a British supplier of MOOCs, working in partnership with a number of Russell Group universities.

The initial offerings are available now for students to enrol on, and include topics such as: Begin programming: build your first mobile game; Discover dentistry; Introduction to forensic science, and The mind is flat: the shocking shallowness of human psychology. I’m just hoping that the dentistry course doesn’t have a practical element.

Speaking about the launch, Prof Martin Bean of the Open University said:

“FutureLearn would be “modularised” and involve “a completely different way of structuring” courses, we’re not going to talk about failures. We’re going to let people set their own targets – god forbid – and measure themselves against their own targets.”

Students would be able to “benchmark” themselves against peers rather than always having to be subject to what he termed “The Man”, “the university saying: ‘You’re a failure because you didn’t do what we said’. I challenge the whole outdated paradigm.”

So, tune in, turn on and drop out  next?

But the key quotation has to be:  “One thing that FutureLearn will never do is to confer university credit. That will always be the domain of the university.”

This is interesting and leads to his final comment about how universities might use MOOCs, to act as a way of granting free access to content, after universities recignise that their future is not about protecting the content that hey own, but by differentiating themselves by their approaches to student experience, pastoral care, teaching and employment opportunities.