MOOCs click with Indians

Sankalp Garud, 17, has taken a course in mathematical thinking at Stanford, calculus at UPenn , social psychology at Wesleyan and mechanics at MIT. All while staying put in Ghatkopar, Mumbai. In Delhi, media manager Tituraj Kashyap is learning about the history of photojournalism from the star professors at University of London and is topping it with a songwriting course from the Boston-based Berklee College of Music. Techie Anand Sathe’s academic basket includes eight courses ranging from machine learning to the theory of irrational behavior (the latter  — taught by Dan Ariely from Duke University — is one of the most popular MOOCs).

They are a rapidly growing number of Indians opting for MOOCs — massive open online courses that have made global classrooms a reality. For Indians, who have a thirst for premium, western education, MOOCs make perfect sense. If you can’t make it to the Ivies, why not bring Ivy-level learning to you, and that too for free.

The three top US-based MOOCs — Coursera, Udacity and EdX — now have a huge percentage of Indian students. The biggest of these Coursera — it has 4.3 million students from across the world — says it is ‘astounded and humbled’ by the interest shown by Indians.

“Our students in India represent the largest percentage of Coursera students outside of the US, roughly 10%. In the past 6 months, Coursera has seen a 139% increase in India student enrollment,” says Stanford professor Daphne Koller who, along with her other computer science colleague Andrew Y NG, set up Coursera. EdX, a non-profit created by Harvard and MIT, has pegged its Indian participation at 13% and Udacity says that India is one of its “top geographic drivers of traffic”. Hardly surprising then that IIT-Bombay is set to join the group of institutions that are partnering with EdX.

MOOCs are seemingly easy to do — you sign up for a course which could stretch over 12 to 15 weeks and dedicate a certain number of hours of study time per week entirely at your convenience. The ‘workload’ could be lectures, reading assignments, quizzes, tests, demo videos and so on. At Coursera you could if you wish ask for a certificate (called Signature Track) or even a web-supervised exam — these are charged and make for an important part of Coursera’s revenues.

A lot of students juggle multiple courses. These serial MOOCers often start with a course, take introductory classes and then drop out or move on to other subjects. This flexibility is also MOOC’s biggest disadvantage. The fact that the course is free, designed for ease and does not have to end in a degree means that you need supreme levels of self discipline to complete a course. “The focus on self-learning means you have to devote enough time to not only watch lectures/read papers but also do background reading as needed,” says Sathe. Quite a few MOOC addicts agree that the quality of MOOCs can fluctuate wildly from excellent to mediocre.

Big MOOCs like Coursera have an eclectic mix of courses — ranging from programming to Beethoven’s piano music — that could appeal to techies, students, or hobbyists. Udacity, on the other hand, sticks to more serious, career-centric stuff. “We have chosen to focus on computer science, programming, mathematics, engineering, design, sciences, and entrepreneurship as we have strong relationships with industry in these fields and our goal is not to just advance our students’ education, but also their career opportunities ,” says Clarissa Shen, VP of strategic business and marketing at Udacity.

For a lot of driven Indian youngsters like Garud, MOOCs are a big part of resume building (he has taken both a Signature Track and a supervised exam for around $150) and, of course, a means to supplement school learning. He has managed to crack calculus at levels way beyond his classmates thanks to MOOC. “Maths lessons in school tend to be so boring,” says Garud who is doing his bit for the MOOC wave by creating free, fun math videos for school children in his locality.

Dispassionate observers point out that MOOCs work best for broad-based subjects. “If breadth is what you desire, these courses work fine. Depth is not something you are going to get given the lack of interactivity and the compressed format. So ‘Introduction to Mayan mathematics’ might work well but ‘An in-depth look at the role of sodium in the human’ would likely fail,” says Sathe. It is unlikely MOOCs will ever even partially replace classroom education. As Koller says, they can at best bolster the existing systems. “In India, where meeting capacity over the next few years means building and staffing new 1,500 universities, we see Coursera playing a new role in increasing institutional capacity by augmenting in-class teaching with online content,” she says.

Source: The Times of India, August 18, 2013

US-based MOOCs consortia in tie-ups with local universities for taking content online

For 29-year-old Anil Kumar, a business consultant at Cognizant Technology Solutions, an online course in ‘gamification’ fast-tracked his career, earning him a consulting project for his firm in the US. Kumar learnt the concept from Coursera, a social entrepreneurship firm partnering with 33 top universities in the world that offer courses online for anyone to take for free. “Since gamification (application of game elements to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges) is a new topic, I was able to scale up fast and have become a subject matter expert,” says Kumar, who has done his engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology and MBA from IIM Indore.

Bhuvanesh Baberwal, an engineer and MBA from IIIT-Gwalior who is preparing for his civil services exams, has completed 60 courses from Coursera and has also enrolled into similar platforms, Udacity and edX. He says the courses opened up world class “good quality education” that would have cost him millions of dollars in a traditional classroom environment of one of the top global schools.

Kumar and Baberwal are among many participants in the global education revolution called MOOCs, or massive open online courses. Interactive learning content is delivered online to any individual, anywhere in the world for free. The lectures are delivered in video chunks and students can watch them at their convenience. Students can also participate in interactive quizzes, short video lectures, open forum discussions and assignments. Though it’s early days yet for MOOCs and experiments on certification, assessment, pedagogy and other aspects are on, they have opened up high quality education opportunities like never before.

India is the largest driver of traffic for the courses outside of the US, according to data from the three MOOCs consortia from the US – Coursera, edX and Udacity – which offer courses from the world’s elite universities. Udacity also has a strong tie to industry and bridges workforce-related skills in their courses. At edX, Indian enrolments are the second highest across all courses. And with nearly 100,000 visits last month alone, India is the largest driver of traffic outside the US for Udacity.

Coursera and edX are exploring associations with several top Indian institutes of higher education, including the IITs. Udacity too sees India as a huge opportunity and is keen on making inroads. A few weeks ago, IIT-Bombay joined edX, and some of its regular courses will be available to lakhs of students in the world. And after the success of its experimental course on web intelligence and big data on Coursera last year, IIT-Delhi is planning to repeat it this year. “We are open to partnering with other institutions so that their students can have access to IIT faculty and resources,” says Prof Huzur Saran, head of computer science department at IIT-Delhi.

Coursera is developing a mobile application so that students from economically weaker backgrounds in India can access courses on Akash tablets, which the government is keen to take to people at Rs. 1,500 a piece. “In India, students face the problem of intermittent internet connectivity. With the mobile App we are developing, students can download course content when they have connectivity and access it later,” says Andrew Ng, one of the co-founders of Coursera, which has about 400 courses and 4 million students. In the past six months, Coursera has seen a 139% increase in Indian student enrolment.

Coursera is also discussing with several Indian universities a model called “flip classroom”. Students can listen to lecture material at home and then come to collaborative classroom teaching. It has introduced an option called Signature Track, which will give students in select courses the opportunity to earn a verified certificate for completing their course on payment of about $50.

AFTP, a MOOC platform that provides application-oriented business courses, is pursuing partnerships with IIT-Kharagpur, IMT-Ghaziabad and IISWBM-Calcutta to offer courses for credit in a “flip classroom” framework. It is also pursuing partnership with employers like CMC to offer courses to new hires. “India is one of our most important target developing nations,” says Raj Chakrabarti, one of its founders and professor of systems engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

While MOOCs promise to change the higher education landscape, they are still in the evolving stages as far as pedagogy, assessment – online tests are open to plagiarism and proxy – and authenticated certification are concerned. The drop-out rate too is very high, with only about 10% of the registered students completing courses.

“Some students are hoping that a certificate of completion can enhance their employment prospects, but we don’t have rigorous enough standards and methods for evaluation to put a lot of weight on these certificates,” says Larry Diamond, Director, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, who teaches a course on democratic development on Coursera.

Experimentations on pedagogy are on. One observation is that half the students start working on their homework before watching video lectures, which could lead to professors assigning homework before the lecture. “It appears that students get more excited about learning when they try to puzzle out a problem,” says Agarwal of edX.

“We are learning about teaching methods with research that can translate to on-campus teaching,” he adds. For example, at MIT, researcher David E Pritchard has been studying how people learn. The data from the first prototype course alone, one that Agarwal taught on Circuits & Electronics, is staggering and can fill 110,000 books. “We recorded every click – all 230 million of them,” he says.

Critics say online courses cannot replace traditional classroom teaching methods and university degrees. However, there seems to be a significant scope for MOOCs as a complementary teaching method, particularly in the context of continuing professional education and ‘lifelong learning’. “We do not believe MOOCs will replace on-campus teaching. But we do see MOOCs as enriching college courses, through blended or hybrid courses,” says Agarwal. In such courses, the lecture portion of a course is delivered online, outside of classroom time, and instructors use class time for more interactions with students on campus.

What form MOOCS eventually take is hard to predict, but for now, they can be a priceless supplement.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), July 19, 2013

Seven IITs, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and Nasscom team up to provide free online courses

Seven leading IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and industry lobby Nasscom are coming together to launch a bunch of free, online courses that could potentially help 100,000-150,000 people a year get high-quality education and make them job-ready.

The courses will be offered using the model of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which is globally creating an upheaval in the world of higher education. The first three courses in computer science are expected to roll out this October. “This programme is particularly relevant to India because of the high number of young students who need to be educated and trained,” says Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice-Chairman of Cognizant.

MOOCs make high-quality education from top universities accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world, online and for free. The model was rolled out in early 2012 back-to-back by two start-ups, Udacity and Coursera, both emerging out of Stanford University. This was followed by edX, MIT-Harvard’s online courses platform.

About 15 faculty members from the seven older IITs will form the faculty and are currently designing the course. The participating IITs are Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Roorkee, Bombay, and Guwahati. “We are currently working out the details of the programme in consultation with Nasscom,” says Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT-Madras.

Seven IITs, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and Nasscom team up to provide free online courses. “We are also hoping to rope in more than 500 mentors on a voluntary basis from industry and academia,” adds AK Ray, professor of the Centre for Educational Technology at IIT-Kharagpur.

This is the biggest industry-academia partnership to help students and professionals access top-quality course content and meet specific industry demands. “For the first time, students from both rural areas and metros will have access to the same content, channel, tests, experts and certification,” says Cognizant’s Narayanan.

People who take the courses will be eligible to write proctored exams for a minimal fee and get certificates. For the computer science courses, IIT will give certification. For the foundation courses, industry will give certificates. It could also be a joint certification with IITs.

“Students from the second year onwards in science and engineering from any college can take the courses that will be offered multiple times a year,” says Andrew Thangaraj, associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT-Madras. “It will make a difference in their career progress.” Google is providing its Course Builder platform for hosting MOOCs. HackerRank will provide their web portal, where students can practise their programming assignments and get them verified and graded.

Till now, IITs have been offering open courseware on the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). This is a repository of video lectures created by professors of the seven older IITs and IISc-Bangalore available to anyone, anywhere in the world on Youtube etc. However, NPTEL does not give any certification; neither does it have any interaction or synchronised classes. In the next phase of NPTEL, all these seven IITs and industry have joined hands to offer courses on the web-based MOOCs platform, which will also offer certification.

“Cognizant has been discussing this idea with academia and industry for the past three years… Cognizant will make available infrastructure at its training facilities during off-peak times, such as weekends, to enable students to take tests and get certified,” says Narayanan.

Initially, IITs will run three mini modules of a computer science course, including programming, algorithm, and data structures. Each module will have 12 lectures and there will be a total of 36 lectures over 12 weeks. Going forward, the plan is to repeat this model in VLSI (very large scale integration) embedded systems and other branches of engineering and general sciences.

“Industry is getting involved with inputs on applicability and problem-solving aspects with the aim of making students more industry and job-ready,” says Sandhya Chintala, executive director, sector skills council, Nasscom, who is leading the programme for the industry association.

Industry has also shared a brief on the skills needed for 67 entrylevel job roles. IITs will make these available on MOOC platform. “This is the first time that industry has articulated the performance of an individual at an entry-level job role. This clarity will help formal or non-formal training institutions to get people job-ready,” says Chintala.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), July 19, 2013

India, US sign four pacts on education – Move to set up Community Colleges in India

Minister for Human Resource Development M.M. Pallam Raju said that given the size of the student community in the country there was a scope for establishing at least 20,000 community colleges. On Tuesday, four Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) were signed in the educational space during the ongoing India-US Higher Education Dialogue 2013.

He said that there was substantial progress and clarity on how to progress on community colleges. The Ministry is working with the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), to develop a framework for community colleges in the country.

An MoU was signed between the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the AACC for setting up community colleges in India.

Further, Raju also said that with the transformation that Massively Open Online Courses (MooCs) are bringing in the educational sphere, the Government is planning to focus on this area. An MoU for this has been signed between IIT Bombay and edX, a non-profit entity created by Harvard and MIT that develops higher education content for open online courses.

Besides this there is an effort to enhance teacher capacity development in collaboration with institutes in the US. Raju said that through these initiatives the Government was trying to adopt best practices of teaching and not trying to mirror models in the West.

When asked if the recent move to introduce four-year courses in University of Delhi could be seen as replicating a Western model and whether it would work in India, Raju said the Government was keeping a close watch on the concerns and any lacunae in the course would be sorted out. While addressing concerns that the talks and MoUs signed on Tuesday could be a way of giving foreign institutions a back-door entry, given that the Foreign Education Providers (Regulation) Bill is yet to come to pass, Raju said these are straightforward agreements to encourage both American and Indian students to go to each others’ countries for studies. He said the Bill, which is pending in Parliament, would be tabled in the upcoming session.

Source: The Hindu Business Line, June 26, 2013