India’s tryst with MOOCs STRATEGIC INTENT

For a little less than four weeks, I’ve enrolled for a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) offered by MITx on the edX platform Leading from the Emerging Future. Otto Scharmer’s highly rated sevenweek course is into its third edition and has already attracted more than 85,000 participants in more than 183 countries in its first year. One of the more distinctive parts of the course is its reliance on the concept of local learning hubs. There are over about 350 hubs that participants have set up to come together and learn. At Founding Fuel, we set up one of our own, where a carefully curated group of entrepreneurs could meet to watch live sessions, work on exercises, discuss and reflect on their learning.

For us, it was an experiment to see how learning communities work. And, so far, while it is still early days, the feedback on the meet-ups has been very encouraging. Participants have turned up for the meet-ups after a long day at work, remained highly engaged for nearly three hours, shared their experiences candidly, and what’s more, most of them have tried their best to invest five to seven hours a week on the course work as well.

But here’s the moot point: It really makes me wonder why India hasn’t innovated enough to embrace technology-based learning. God knows that we need it urgently. We lack enough goodquality higher education institutions, and more importantly, we don’t have enough trained faculty. And, making education accessible in a country that’s the size of a continent is far from easy.

In case you didn’t know, the central government has had an ambitious MOOCs programme of its own lined up for launch for the past two years. And like any government initiative, it has had its own share of controversies and challenges. But there’s hope that Swayam – as the program is known – will see the light of day sooner than later. The project is interesting not only because it allows faculty in University Grants Commission-certified educational institutions to offer more than 3,000 courses in management, engineering and humanities on a single platform, but also because students can now get 20 per cent credits in the university system by enrolling and completing these courses on their own. Now that’s a big step forward. At a conceptual level, it automatically injects more choice into our rigid university system. For instance, a student based in Arunachal Pradesh can now get access to the best faculty that she would never have imagined possible. For a faculty member, too, there’s an opportunity to step out of the confines of their own system, and engage with a wider community.

Just how many places of higher learning are currently geared to handle the transition to this brave, new world is another matter altogether. For instance, it took more than two years for Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) to get off the blocks, largely thanks to the prodding, cajoling and pushing by its erstwhile director Sushil Vachani. Today, IIM-B offers over 20 online courses on the edX and Open edX platform, with nearly 300,000 enrolments, with over two-thirds coming from outside India. Now, that’s a pretty good start, given that, as Mr Vachani told me on a Skype call from the US, they started out almost like any scrappy start-up with a frugal approach in mid-2014.

Think about it. There’s been considerable debate over whether IIMs should globalise. This way, it has taken IIM-B much less time and resources to build visibility and attract students than any brick-and-mortar presence outside India could do, avers P D Jose, the current faculty member in charge of the MOOCs initiative at IIM-B. What’s more, even as any of the new IIMs – in Nagpur, Shillong, Sambalpur, or even Jammu – struggle to attract faculty, the new MOOCs could potentially offer opportunities for blended learning, and thereby take some of the load off the existing faculty and allow for asynchronous, self-paced learning. Or indeed follow the flipped-classroom model, where the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while inclass time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions.

The real challenge though is capacity building. Apart from access to a range of thought leaders at MIT, Mr Scharmer’s course is assisted by a team of PhD students, who work as teaching assistants. The quality of videos, the interactive graphics, the quizzes and assignments, the course design (especially the reliance on local hubs) have clearly raised the bar. The UX certainly needs improvement, but the sheer responsiveness from the team to participant queries has helped tide over the teething troubles.

Next month, Mr Vachani will be in India to lead faculty-development programs in Bengaluru and New Delhi. And that might actually be the best starting point, if ambitious government projects such as Swayam are to take off.

Think about it. There’s been considerable debate over whether IIMs should globalise. This way, it has taken IIM-B much less time and resources to build visibility and attract students than any brick-and-mortar presence outside India could do