When Vicki and I found out a few months ago that one of the new Futurelearn MOOCs we’d be supporting was on Burns and was due to launch on Burns night (25th January 2016) we were excited and a little bit apprehensive. Excited because it’s a fabulous subject and we knew that there was a wealth of expertise at the University, such as the Centre for Robert Burns Studies as well as academics in Scottish Literature and History – so we knew that any course created was going to be of high quality and likely to be a success; slightly apprehensive as we know just how long it takes to develop good online teaching materials, and we were concerned that there was just not going to be enough time for the educators (the Futurelearn term for lecturers) to actually get all the materials ready in time.
However, thanks to a lot of hard work by Ronnie Young and all the others (see below) not forgetting Dave Collins and the other members of the Media Production Unit, the course is ready to start, and it launches this coming Monday. Earlier this week the Burns MOOC hit the papers. The Herald ran an article, as did the Daily Record, the Telegraph, Scottish Mail and the Metro. With over 5,500 learners already signed up, it’s now getting to the exciting bit and we’re looking forward to seeing it unfold over the next few weeks.You can sign up for it here if you want – as with all our MOOCs there is no cost for joining and participating.
So well done to Ronnie, Gerry, Catriona and Pauline for making all of this happen in such a short period of time.
flickr photo by Bravehardt shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license