Director of Open Online Courses: an update and an opportunity
Wednesday, 27 May 2015
Having steered the University’s involvement in open online courses for more than two years, the current Director of Open Online Courses, Professor Shirley Williams, is retiring at the end of July. We are therefore seeking to appoint a new Director of OOCs to provide the academic leadership for the University’s open online courses on a secondment basis of up to 0.3FTE for two years. For more details on the role, please see: http://bit.ly/1ISJPLy
Since the launch of the FutureLearn platform in October 2013 the University has offered eight distinct courses from around the University attracting over 300,000 enrolments. This makes Reading one of the most popular partners amongst the 1.6 million learners on the platform, with a number of our courses exceeding 35,000 learners extending our global reach into more than 100 different countries.
Following on from this success, the University is developing a number of new courses to add to our existing portfolio, including a course featuring Dr Matthew Nicholls’ digital model of Rome, and a course introducing cognitive behavioural therapy from the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences.
Courses have driven collaboration with external organisations such as the British Heart Foundation on our course Heart Health: A Beginner’s Guide to Cardiovascular Disease. Furthermore, two of our courses, Begin Programming and Begin Robotics, will feature in the BBC’s forthcoming Make it Digital campaign.
Most of our courses have run more than once and we currently have three courses running and two about to start. If you would like to join a course you can sign up at: https://www.futurelearn.com/partners/university-of-reading.