MOOCs at a click

Technology is making the world go round and this is happening with amazing alacrity. Thanks to the IT boom and innovation, on-line education is expanding world over and so much more in India. The fever is catching up with students and professionals alike, who are taking to the learning like fish to water. Consider this, India is the second largest market for Coursera, an educational technology company founded by Stanford University to offer Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCS). Experts believe that the Indian e-learning market will grow to over USD 40 billion in the next four years.

“It’s definitely a rising trend,” says Gaurav Vohra, CEO, Jigsaw Academy, which offers online courses in analytics. The benefits of e-learning are huge and will impact traditional learning.

Classroom learning already includes components of e-learning as well.

The roots of the e-learning in India could be traced to initiatives taken by institutions like NIIT and IGNOU, which started the virtual campuses in the late 1990s. Although these were online education programmes with a limited scope, they brought about a new wave in the country’s education industry. “This medium of education delivery became prominent only toward second half of  the last decade,” says S Nagendra, executive VP, MeritTrac Services Pvt Ltd,   part of the Manipal Global Education (MAGE) and an on-line testing and  assessment services company.

One of the major reasons for rise of e-learning is its accessibility. In case of India which constitutes17% of the world’s population, it is a fact that educating this vast population is a challenge. Moreover, the demand for education has increased considerably in the last two decades. “Traditional institutes don’t have the wherewithal to address this need. As a result, a large number of degree as well as short, quick and focused certificate programmes are offered on the online platform,” explains  Nagendra.

Referring to research reports, Vohra suggests that in 2003, 40,000 instructors were teaching 1,50,000 online courses to more than 6 million students across 55 countries. Since then, the global e-learning market has grown by 900%, and it is predicted that by 2019, 50% of all classes will be delivered online.  “Virtual education is economically viable and is not constrained to a classroom. As a result, universities like ours can expand their reach and offer training to talented students across the world,” reflects Robin Goldberg, CMO, of the Silicon valley-based Minerva University, which has opened admissions to undergraduate students globally.

Minerva is waving off tuition fees for the first year and then will charge USD10,000 per year for the next three years of the course. With the current economic turmoil, this has and will be a win-win situation. “This is almost 25% of the cost that foreign students pay in the US for an in-house course,” says Goldberg, who believes that economical aspect of good quality education at a low price is always an opportunity and never a risk.

First two semesters of the undergraduate programme will be conducted in San Francisco and the subsequent semesters will be in seven countries across the globe. “Students can choose to either study in their home country or a country of their choice. A professor from San Francisco will deliver the lecture on-line,” explains Goldberg.