UCL Launches First Online Course

UCL HAS LAUNCHED ITS FIRST EVER ONLINE COURSE AIMING TO TEACH THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

After announcing that it would start offering online courses in May 2015, UCL has recently launched its first. The service will be offered through the FutureLearn platform, a website that already offers hundreds of such courses. The course itself will commence on the 29th February.

UCL’s MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) will last for five weeks, and will be completely free and open to anyone. The course content will be taken from genuine research from UCL Anthropology. Nine researchers from the department spent 15 months examining the use of social media across the world, from towns in England to the low-income towns in Brazil.

The FutureLearn website is known to be innovative in its approach to learning, and participants in the UCL course can expect nothing less. The course will contain video discussions, lectures, animations and infographics, as well as text.

Professor Daniel Miller, from UCL Anthropology, said of the study:

For anyone who is serious about understanding the impact of social media, we feel this research will be a revelation. Whether we are concerned with politics, education, gender, commerce or communication, it turns out that the use and consequences of social media varies hugely depending upon which region we focus upon. Even we were astonished by many of our discoveries.

The course will be in English, but can be taken in different languages (including Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Hindi) on UCL eXtend.

FutureLearn has 57 partners across the world, many of which are prestigious universities, institutions, and cultural bodies. Since it opened in 2013, around 1.5 million people from 190 countries have signed up to take its courses.