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UOW joins global social learning community

June 12, 2015

UOW joins global social learning community

A global audience with a thirst for knowledge will have the opportunity to tap into research-based education.

A global audience with a thirst for knowledge will have the opportunity to tap into research-based education following UOW's recent partnership agreement with UK social learning platform FutureLearn.

In partnership with over 60 institutions, FutureLearn offers a diverse range of free online courses from leading educators around the world.  

UOW joins this prestigious group in the newly created Centres of Excellence member category, which focuses on research-based education. The four UOW global challenge research centres to be included are:

  • Australian Institute of Innovative Materials (AIIM): AIIM brings together biologists, clinicians, chemists, physicists engineers and materials scientists to develop and apply new innovative materials for energy generation and storage, medical devices and implants as well as next generation electronics. 
     
  • Centre for Archaeological Science (CAS): CAS uses modern scientific techniques to answer fundamental questions about human evolution, past human life and activities.
     
  • Early Start Research Institute (ESRI): ESRI research reaches across the spectrum of children’s educational, physical and socio-emotional development and is helping transform the lives of children, youth and families.
     
  • Graduate School of Medicine (GSM): The GSM is part of the School of Medicine and has a regional and rural focus. The school ‘s graduate medical practitioners and health professionals are ready to navigate society’s healthcare challenges at a local, national and global level.
     

UOW Vice-Chancellor Professor Paul Wellings CBE said the partnership marked a new approach to the volatile open-education sector while ensuring the University retained its grounding as a source of inspiration and innovation for the community. 

“UOW was born out of a local community hungry for higher learning and we have long sought to be a place where discovery, learning and technology help transform the lives of people around us,” he said. 

“This University is leading the way in tackling global challenges in health, sustainability and early childhood development. The opportunity to share with a global learning community the impact our research has on everyday lives is an exciting extension of who we are at UOW.” 


For UOW Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic, Professor Eeva Leinonen, FutureLearn was a natural fit. 

“Universities are about research and they are about learning,” she said. “Yet the two areas are not independent, they complement each other to enhance learning and to provide graduates with enhanced research skills.

"That’s why this new work with FutureLearn is so important to us. It gives us a chance to bring both our world-class research and our research-led learning to an international arena to work with communities to explore global challenges.” 

UOW aims to have the MOOC courses open for enrolment in early 2016. Each course will run for six weeks and will be periodically re-run according to demand. 

FutureLearn Chief Executive Simon Nelson said: “I am delighted to welcome these four Centres of Excellence from the University of Wollongong to the FutureLearn partnership. As we tailor our course portfolio around in-demand subject areas, it becomes all the more important we seek out world leading educators in those fields.” 

About FutureLearn
FutureLearn is a social learning platform based in the UK and providing free, online courses from world-class educators. The partnership consists of higher and specialist education institutions from the UK and around the world, alongside cultural icons like the British Library, British Council and the British Museum. All these offer high quality courses to anyone with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

The FutureLearn course experience centres on social interaction, whereby people learn by engaging in conversations around the learning material. FutureLearn is wholly owned by The Open University (UK), which has over 40 years’ expertise in distance and online learning. For more information, visit futurelearn.com.