{"id":1080,"date":"2017-01-13T11:15:44","date_gmt":"2017-01-13T11:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/?p=1080"},"modified":"2017-01-13T11:23:16","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T11:23:16","slug":"kents-erlang-expertise-now-available-to-5-million-learners-for-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/2017\/01\/13\/kents-erlang-expertise-now-available-to-5-million-learners-for-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Kent’s Erlang expertise now available to 5 million learners for free"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Functional Programming in Erlang<\/a>‘, the first MOOC (massive open online course) dedicated to Erlang,\u00a0is now\u00a0open for enrolment. This is the first MOOC from\u00a0the\u00a0the University of Kent in partnership with\u00a0FutureLearn, the social learning platform with 5 million learners.<\/p>\n

The Erlang MOOC\u00a0will begin on 20th February 2017 and\u00a0learners can enroll now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Functional programming has become increasingly important in providing global-scale applications on the internet. For example, the language is the basis of the WhatsApp messaging system, which now has over a billion users.<\/p>\n

Simon Thompson<\/a> is the main educator on the MOOC. He is Professor of Logic and Computation at the School of Computing at the University of Kent and has been a teacher and researcher in functional programming for most of his career.<\/p>\n

This first course is designed to teach the principles of functional programming and combines treatment of the theory of functional programming, and the practice of how that works in Erlang and is reinforced through practical exercises as well as more substantial suggested practical projects. The course is suitable for learners who have some prior experience of programming but functional programming experience in particular is not required. A further 3-week course \u201cConcurrent Programming in Erlang\u201d, focusing on concurrency, will be offered from April.<\/p>\n

In addition to the Erlang Programming courses, The University of Kent is also developing courses in understanding autism and in endurance sports performance which learners will be able to enroll for early next year.<\/p>\n

Nigel Smith, Head of Content at FutureLearn, commented, \u201cThe University of Kent is considered one of the leading authorities in functional programming so we are delighted that their first course on our platform will enable our learners to benefit from their years of expertise in this subject area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr Mark O\u2019Connor, MOOCs project lead at the University of Kent, commented, \u201cWe are very much looking forward to an exciting partnership with FutureLearn. We first investigated MOOCs with a successful pilot in Erlang, as part of a \u2018Beacon Project\u2019 celebrating the University of Kent\u2019s 50th<\/sup> anniversary. One of the key recommendations from our pilot was to partner with FutureLearn, so that we can use their excellent and accessible specialized MOOC platform and achieve greater reach for our courses. We\u2019re now delighted to bring this improved course to a wider audience and to develop further online courses to strengthen public engagement with scholarship and research at Kent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Founded by The Open University in 2012, FutureLearn is a social learning platform, designed to support learning through conversation. It offers over 5 million learners free online courses from world-leading UK and international universities, centres of research excellence and specialist education providers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Functional Programming in Erlang‘, the first MOOC (massive open online course) dedicated to Erlang,\u00a0is now\u00a0open for enrolment. This is the first MOOC from\u00a0the\u00a0the University of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5321,"featured_media":1082,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124],"tags":[112457,112442,150027,150026],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5321"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1084,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions\/1084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/unikentcomp-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}