Dive Brief:
- UK company FutureLearn’s latest offering has drawn the largest massive open online course enrollment to date with 382,000 students worldwide.
- Times Higher Education reports the course is meant to prepare people for the IELTS English proficiency test and has drawn the interest of students from 153 countries.
- FutureLearn got a slow start in MOOCs compared to U.S. companies like Coursera, but the latest enrollment victory has FutureLearn executives taunting its competitors across the Atlantic, according to the article.
Dive Insight:
FutureLearn’s new course, Understanding IELTS: Techniques for English Language Tests, started May 11 with a large portion of its students signing in from the Middle East, as well as Asia and Latin America. The IELTS is one of the most common English language proficiency tests in the world with more than 2.2 million assessments completed just last year, according to the company’s website. The IELTS is a British test so it's not surprising that students worldwide trust a British company to deliver the best preparation.
