London University gains 2,00,000 students for online courses

London University is celebrating the number of students getting into its online courses. More than 2,00,000 students signed up for the first loop of online courses offered by the University of London's international programmes.

According to source, the university will take up four online courses, the so called Mooc's (Massive Open Online Course) in the first year.

However, this has also showed the high dropout rate with only about 9,000 students completing a course. The director of academic development, Mike Kerrison said, "The experiment so far had been very successful."

The university's international programmes are known as one of UK's early adopters, which delivers university courses through the Internet. The programmes specialises in providing degrees by distance learning and has been providing such course since the 19th century.

According to the reports, at the end of the first year, the scale of interest in such online courses had 2,10,000 students registering for Mooc's. The reports say that, on reflecting the demand for higher education, this is about four times the total number of conventional students studying with the university of London's international programmes.

Among those students who signed up for Mooc's, 90,000 were categorised as active students who participated in one of the four pilot courses, which were about computer programming, law, malicious software and the use of photography.

The university officials said "there was a strong sense of value from students, with 91% rating their experience as good, very good or excellent. However, there online courses, with no formal entry requirements, have high dropout rate, and in this case there were 8,843 students who received a statement of accomplishment for successful completion."

Some of the prestigious institutions which have been particular in online courses such as Coursera and edX in the US are Harvard, MIT and Stanford. These institutions have also spread into international networks with major recent partnerships in China and France.

The chief executive Simon Nelson said, "the response in this first term had exceeded all our expectations."