Bengaluru: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have, over the last few years, marked the digitisation of education. MOOCs are aimed at unlimited participation and open access through the web and began at Harvard University, which allowed classes to be streamed online through public channels, which were accessible to anyone for free. Although premier institutes in India have toyed with this idea for some time, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, became the first in the country to hop on to the bandwagon.
On June 11, Professor Sushil Vachani, Director, IIMB, formally announced its MOOCs, to be launched by December this year. Armed with the belief that the future of education is online and to remove the constraints of a physical setting, IIMBx, done in partnership with edX, will roll out its premium management education courses to anybody who is interested.
“Our first promise is that of massive reach,” said Dr Vachani. “It is also an enormous opportunity for social impact. We want to reach out to the masses and make the power of technology accessible to everyone by highlighting quality and designing courses carefully to make it easily delivered to all. We also plan to introduce various regional transcripts to reach the majority of India's learners,” he added.
The courses have been handpicked by the IIMB faculty, said Dr Vachani and will be delivered free of cost. “One of the many benefits of the MOOC is continuous learning made convenient in every form of the various gizmos we use today,” he said.
Dr Shankar Venkatagiri’s Statistics for Business will be the first course in the programme and will be introduced on July 7. Over 5,000 registrations have already been received. Courses on Innovation and IT Management, by Professor Rahul De and Introduction to Operations Management, Prof. B. Mahadevan will follow later in July and August.
“We have received an overwhelming response from participants, with about 10,000 registrations in a very short span of time,” said Dr Vachani. “IIMB will launch eight courses in the first year. The response to these will be carefully monitored and analysed so that we not only improve the design of future MOOCs, but also use our own learning to enhance the educational experience of the students enrolled in on-campus programmes,” he said.
