MOOC in India and Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is aimed at unlimited participation and open access to education via internet. Apart from traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. MOOCs are a recent and widely researched development in distance education which were first introduced in 2008 and emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012. Government of India has launched SWAYAM (https://swayam.gov.in/) as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Swayam is a platform that would bind Indian higher education, both online and offline.

This topic should be analyzed in the light of below questions for your mains examination.

Can expansion of MOOCs solve the fundamental inadequacies of Indian Higher Education?

MOOCs can provide the Indian students an edge required to compete in the global market. MOOCs can enhance the edge of Indian students in the global job market and improve their chances of admission to top US and European colleges and graduate schools. However, expansion of MOOCs may not solve the fundamental inadequacies of Indian higher education in near future. This is because there are technological, educational, and cultural hurdles restricting access to these courses.

Can MOOCs Help Expand Access to Higher Education in India? What are the challenges?

MOOCs can help to a great extent to overcome higher education challenges and in fact they have done so in many other countries. Some of the leading universities around the world have partnered with MOOC provides such as courseera, EDX and tried to deliver high quality online courses to millions of students around the world. But there are several issues.

• MOOCs will be able to make substantial impact only when the universities are able to upgrade their technical infrastructure.
• The major issue with MOOCs is their evaluation mechanism. They are student focussed but in most cases the assessment mechanism is not very strong.
• MOOCs are provided free but creation of content as study material is not free. The cost of creating the content can burden the universities with extra costs. Thus, there needs to be a mechanism to handle the financial requirements of creating MOOCs.
• In due course, MOOCs may undermine the physical classrooms and local colleges and exacerbate educational inequality.

For MOOCs to provide equitable path addressing India’s high education challenges, following are some of the ways ahead – Firstly, the technological infrastructure of universities and colleges  needs to be upgraded; Secondly, the MOOC provides should be able to leverage the mobile phone revolution; Thirdly, the largest demand for courses in India is of technical and professional fields. MOOCs that are geared towards these disciplines can really ease the burden over existing institutions. Lastly, there is a need of greater investment in the field considering the fact that India has one of the largest number of students accessing the MOOCs.