Education for all Indian students opting for open online courses

BANGALORE: A large number of Indian students are accessing Ivy League content through Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) that provides free access to best-in-class education taught by faculty at top universities.top universities like Stanford, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for free.

Microsoft Research India has rolled out a pilot project with Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) for a MOOC-like experiment blending online education with classroom learning. As part of its Massively Empowered Classroom project, Microsoft Research is offering free online certification on algorithm, design and analysis (ADA) for engineering students.

Two thousand students across 27 engineering colleges have enrolled for the semester-long programme so far. "The recent excitement for MOOC is subtle and obvious. Technology has made students the centre of learning as opposed to constrained by a classroom," said P Anandan, MD of Microsoft Research India. The course offers video lectures, online quizzes and tests at the end of each topic. Top ten students will get an opportunity to intern at Microsoft Research besides getting a certification from them.

A clutch of startups like Coursera, Udacity and Khan Academy provide new ways to connect, collaborate and share information leading to new-age pedagogy. US-based Coursera founded by computer science professors -- Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University -- offers over 300 courses from 20 categories including engineering, humanities, medicine and mathematics created by 62 varsities from 16 countries.

"MOOCs can be a great way to supplement formal higher education as well as to gain cross-functional knowledge. It opens up access to quality content thereby democratising higher education. over 3 lakh Indian students have enrolled to MOOCs in the last few months," said Antony Alex, CEO of Rainmaker, test management company focused on the legal ecosystem.

With an estimated 150 million people in the age group of 18-23 years, the educational sector offers one of the most attractive, yet highly complex market for the private and foreign players, said a recent Deloitte report. Currently, the government spends around 3.8% of its GDP on education. Less than 1% of the $38 billion of the government spend on education was towards capital expenditure in 2008-09, it said.

However, many educationists feel MOOC will transform the way higher education is delivered in the country. "We expect to see more partnerships between MOOC providers and Indian universities wherein MOOC courses are integrated with existing Indian courses in a "flipped classroom" framework, for both on-campus as well as distance learning programmes," said Raj Chakrabarti, professor of systems engineering in Carnegie Mellon University. He and his colleague Anisha Ghosh have started The Academic Financial Trading Platform (AFTP), the MOOC platform dedicated exclusively to business education.

Last November, AFTP launched its first course -- investment analysis. Professor Christian Julliard of the London School of Economics is teaching AFTP's second course - Macroeconomics, which launches in June 2013.

Chakrabarti says that Indian students can leverage on MOOC to stay competitive. "Given the limited capacity of seats at top US and Indian universities, these features enhance the competitive edge of Indian students in the global job market and improves their chances of admission to top US and European colleges and graduate schools," he added.