Moocs, and the man leading the UK's charge

Twenty months ago, Simon Nelson was shown a picture of a Highland cow, known in Gaelic as a kyloe. It was the Open University's code name for a secret project which, according to some accounts, will revolutionise higher education, making it available to millions across the world at zero cost. Today, Nelson, whose previous job at the BBC involved launching iPlayer, heads FutureLearn, a company that, 11 months after it opened for business, has 450,000 learners studying courses from 40 leading universities, 10 of them overseas including two in China. The subjects range from dentistry to Shakespeare, archaeology to cancer, the Higgs boson to 15th-century England. Many more students and courses will follow, Nelson says. "We have just built the foundations. See where we are in six months, a year, two years, three years. There's tens of millions in the UK who'll be interested in what we offer and the international audience is enormous."

FutureLearn is the first big British venture into Moocs (hence the OU's cow, geddit?), a name which Nelson admits is "appalling". Moocs are "massive open online courses": "massive" because they can be taken by thousands simultaneously; "open" because there is no selection of students and no fees; and "online" because you can read course materials, hear lectures, watch videos and take tests from just about anywhere on the planet. David Willetts, science minister until last month's reshuffle, has said Moocs "will revolutionise conventional models of formal education". Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and enthusiast for globalisation, has said nothing "has more potential to lift people out of poverty". Lifelong learning for all – a goal that visionary educationalists have pursued for decades – can at last become a reality. If, that is, you believe the hype.

"The revolution that has higher education gasping" (New York Times) began on America's west coast, in the computer science department of Stanford University, California. In 2011, the department's internationally renowned academic Sebastian Thrun, developer of Google's driverless car, put his three-month introductory course on artificial intelligence online, allowing anybody to access the same lectures and homework assignments as his Stanford students. To his astonishment, 160,000 people, aged from 10 to 70, from more than 190 countries, signed up. Even more amazingly, the top 400 places in the final exam went to the internet students, not to Stanford students paying annual fees of $52,000 (£31,000). Thrun was so excited that, with colleagues, he set up a company, Udacity, to deliver more courses. "I can't teach at Stanford again," he said. "I've seen Wonderland." Udacity now has 1.6 million users. It is one of several American platforms for Moocs, including edX (2.5 million users, 215 courses), founded by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The sceptics are almost as numerous as the enthusiasts. Oddly, Thrun is now among them, saying a few months ago that "we don't educate people … as I wished; we have a lousy product". Udacity has switched its focus to vocational courses – a computer science master's degree offered jointly with Georgia Institute of Technology, for example – for which students pay fees, albeit only a third or less of what they would pay on campus. Other critics accuse Moocs of peddling outdated pedagogy; of playing a cruel trick on the masses because, even if courses are openly accessible, credentials will be as tightly controlled as ever; and even of being a new tool of western imperialism. Far from reaching new audiences, the majority of Moocs students – over 70% in FutureLearn's case – already have degrees. Yet the completion rates are usually below 10%. Some critics warn of a future in which thousands of academics lose their jobs (echoing journalists who work for newspapers that lack an online paywall, many ask "why give away our content for nothing?"); only the elite institutions flourish because everybody prefers output from, say, Oxford or Harvard; and higher education, turned into a mass market industry, settles into uniformity with a few courses and a few star lecturers. When the Harvard professor and 2009 Reith lecturer Michael Sandel turned his course, Justice, into a Mooc, staff at one university protested that it would be "downright scary" if every philosophy student in America took the same social justice course.

Nelson doesn't accept most of the criticisms but also distances himself from some of the hype. "There have been some wild claims about solving world poverty and the educational problems of the developing world," he says. Moocs won't, he promises, develop into a winner-takes-all market, as the books and recorded music markets have. "There are huge differences between the providers. Learning is not something you can commodify."

We meet in FutureLearn's open-plan offices in the British Library in London. Nelson, 45, is an unlikely geek. He went to Manchester grammar school and Downing College, Cambridge, where he was tutored for a time by the very ungeekish classicist and TV presenter Mary Beard. From 16 to 21, he studied nothing but ancient languages and civilisations. He says his mother, a passionate bridge player, adopted the internet before he did. With no particular career ambitions, he took a part-time MBA at Manchester University while working for a family friend in a wholesale wig and toupee business. He later worked in the marketing department of the Independent newspaper before joining the BBC where he eventually rose to a senior management position in charge of digital operations. He left the BBC in 2010 and freelanced briefly before the Highland cow came into his life. He has ended up where he is, he says, by "bizarre serendipity".

So how is FutureLearn different from its American competitors? Nelson claims that FutureLearn alone is optimised for mobile devices but then moves on to what seems to be, in the marketing jargon, its unique selling point. "We started from the belief that learning has to be social," he explains. "If you go on many online learning platforms, you see a succession of videos while message and discussion groups are add-ons. Here, on every page, every video, every article" – he switches on his laptop to demonstrate – "we integrate the discussion right alongside the content. You can click a button, even in the middle of a video, and make a comment, ask a question or answer one. OU facilitators can come in. Learners can choose to follow particular facilitators or fellow students. We have peer review. Learners can write short pieces and then discuss each other's work. We put discussion steps into the course materials.

"We believe that much of the learning comes from the discussion. Nearly 40% of our learners are actively commenting. At the BBC, I ran message boards for Radios 3 and 4. They could be horrible places, with terrible trolling. We have nothing like that. We are already getting superb results, even though the tools are still rudimentary – we shall develop them much further."

By minimising what he calls the "loneliness of distance learning", Nelson says, FutureLearn is cutting non-completion rates. Of those who begin its six- to eight-week courses (discounting those who sign up but never start), 22% complete a majority of steps and all assessments, a figure that Nelson claims as "two to three times better than other providers". Those who complete can get a "statement of participation", costing £24. "Since you can't prove it was you who did the course," Nelson says, "it's not an authenticated certificate. But people do see it as valuable." On some courses, students can take an exam costing about £120 – set by the university that runs the course – in a test centre which requires ID and supplies invigilators.

Charging for end-of-course assessment is just one way that FutureLearn – a profit-making company owned by the non-profit OU – expects to make money. Others include tuition and the sale of supporting material, such as CDs of Shakespeare plays. Student data, however, will not be sold to private companies. "This is an extremely sensitive area and we want our students to feel they can trust us," Nelson says.

Who are the students? Isn't FutureLearn, like other Moocs, simply offering further advantages to the already advantaged? "I'm very sanguine that the majority have degrees. We're offering demanding courses from leading universities. But that said, 30% don't have a degree, which is quite a large number." Some study for professional development – Nelson mentions dentists scattered across Paraguay who are together studying dental photography – others as preparation for full-time university courses. A large number, however, are leisure learners pursuing knowledge without explicit vocational ambitions.

Will students ever get university degrees, in whole or in part, if they take sufficient FutureLearn courses? Nelson says that's up to the universities; a reasonable answer, but perhaps also an evasive one. So far, one course is recognised by a professional accountancy body so that students who complete it are exempt from one module of its exams. But the universities that provide Moocs, here and in America, are reluctant to offer degree credit.

Like the future of newspapers, the future of universities in a digital world is a mystery to which nobody can give a confident answer. "The internet is disrupting higher education and it's not going away," Nelson says. He's probably right about that. If nothing else, universities will surely stop holding conventional on-campus lectures; what's the point of standing in front of students talking for an hour when there's a superior means of introducing them to new knowledge? But it's hard to believe Moocs will ever replace the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge, neither of which has signed up to FutureLearn, or, indeed, that they pose much threat to other Russell Group universities. The real attraction of elite universities, and the value of their degrees, lies in their exclusivity. Their exacting entry requirements determine their reputation, not the quality of their teaching.

For FutureLearn, says Nelson, "the sky's the limit". That may be true for those who crave learning for its own sake, but not for those who seek the prestige and status of a top-level university degree.