20,000 students in the first 24 hours: UK enters MOOC space with social, mobile FutureLearn

Until last Wednesday, US-based learning platforms have led the development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Together, those platforms, including Coursera, edX, and Udacity, serve an estimated 3 million learners worldwide with courses from a number of elite partner institutions, such as Harvard and MIT.

But now, in the same week in which edX announced a partnership with Google for the development of a new, open-source online learning system, the UK has launched its own – and its first-ever – MOOC platform: FutureLearn.