Online learning has been around for a while now, and most major tertiary institutions have some kind of online course management system, even if only to help manage classes presented in the real world.

But over the last few years, online education has really taken off, with course software designed to support teaching and learning online. You may be familiar with Edmodo, which is designed to look and feel like a social media platform and can be used with secondary students.

Lore is similar in intent to Edmodo, and offers similar functionality, but looks much more suited to adult learning (it’s developed for tertiary students, was previously known as Coursebake and has big names such as Harvard and Yale attached to it). We’ll be testing it in the next round of the PLN course.

Coursera is a platform that provides online courses from a wide range of providers: this week Coursera announced partnerships with a further 17 universities including University of Melbourne and Columbia. You’ll hear much more about this and other MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) which provide mostly short courses for free from major education providers all over the world. MOOCs provide an amazing opportunity to undertake professional development online – for free.

Here’s a brief introduction to MOOCs: