philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Berlin-Based iversity Relaunches As MOOCs Platform, Sets Its Sights On Becoming The Coursera Of Europe

Berlin-based startup iversity, founded in 2011 to offer online collaboration tools for learning management, has relaunched itself as a platform for massive open online courses. Its first batch of MOOCs are due to go live around September/October, at the start of the winter study term, with a view to steadily expanding the number of courses offered on its platform and ramping up student numbers from the initially expected six-digits.

In order to encourage institutions and academics to kickstart its platform business, iversity has launched a competition — under the grand title of MOOC Production Fellowship and in partnership with German education think tank Stifterverband – asking for MOOC concepts to be submitted. The competition runs to the end of April. Ten winners will be chosen and will each receive a grant of €25,000 to produce their course in time for iversity’s inaugural winter term.

”We became convinced that the MOOCs phenomenon is not just your regular hype but a very substantive trend or new business that’s emerging.”

According to Riecke, iversity is looking at three likely business models:

• certification fees for students — these won’t be implemented this year, says Riecke, but will be coming to iversity in 2014
• licensing fees — where physical universities pay iversity to license courses to replace some of the classes they conduct (likely for introductory courses, freeing the university’s staff up for more in-depth teaching)
• recruiting fees — generated by providing a “recruiting intelligence” service to employers based on students’ performance in relevant classes

See the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/11/iversity-moocs-pivot/?ncid=tcdaily